Text to Binary and Hex

What it does

This tool shows the bytes behind a piece of text and turns bytes back into text. Type a word and see it as binary (01001000 01101001), hexadecimal (48 69), decimal (72 105) or octal (110 151). Paste a string of bytes from a packet dump, a debugger or a homework exercise and read it as text again.

All conversion goes through UTF-8, so it works for every language and for emoji, not just for plain ASCII. That makes it easy to see why 你好 is six bytes long or why an emoji counts as four bytes in a database column.

How to use

1. Choose Text → bytes to encode or Bytes → text to decode.
2. Pick the number format: binary, hex, decimal or octal.
3. When encoding, choose a separator between bytes (space, none, comma or new line), and whether hex letters are uppercase.
4. Type or paste your input. The result updates as you type and can be copied or downloaded.

Decoding rules

When decoding, the tool is forgiving about layout:

• Bytes can be separated by spaces, commas, semicolons or line breaks, in any mix.
• Common prefixes are stripped: 0x, \x and % for hex, 0b for binary, 0o or \ for octal.
• A long run without separators is split into fixed-width bytes: 8 digits for binary, 2 for hex and 3 for octal or decimal.
• A value above 255 or a digit that does not belong to the format is reported with its line and column.

Example

Encoding Hi 你好 as binary gives nine bytes: two for Hi, one for the space, and three for each Chinese character. The same text in hex is 48 69 20 e4 bd a0 e5 a5 bd, which is exactly what you would see in a hex editor or in a URL as %E4%BD%A0.

When it helps

Developers use it to check how text is stored on disk or sent over the network, to compare string lengths in bytes and characters, and to debug mojibake. Students use it to practise binary and hexadecimal by hand and check the answers.