How to convert text to binary
- Type or paste your text into Input.
- Each character becomes one or more 8-bit bytes in the output. Choose what goes between the bytes.
- Switch to Binary to text to turn binary back into words.
How text becomes binary
Computers store every character as a number. The letter A is 65, a space is 32 and the digit 1 is 49. Written in base 2, with only the digits 0 and 1, 65 becomes 01000001. Each digit is a bit, and eight bits make a byte. Translating text to binary means looking up each character’s number and writing it out as eight bits.
Reading binary by hand
Each position in a byte is worth double the one to its right: 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. Add up the positions that hold a 1. For 01000001 that’s 64 + 1 = 65, which is A. Lowercase letters start at 97 (01100001), so the third bit from the left is the difference between upper and lower case.