Binary translator
One box, both directions: paste text to get binary, paste binary to get text. The direction switches itself as you type.
- Runs in your browser
- Nothing you enter is sent
- Free, no account
The translation appears here.
Always eight bits per byte. Accented letters, CJK and emoji take two to four bytes each — the same bits a file on disk would hold.
Applies to generated output. Input is parsed with any spacing at all — every non-binary character is ignored.
One box, both directions
Paste anything. If the input is nothing but ones, zeros and whitespace it is treated as binary
and decoded; anything else is encoded. The swap button overrides the guess whenever it gets it
wrong — which it will, for instance, if your actual message is the word 1010.
A quick reference
| Character | Binary (8-bit) | Character | Binary (8-bit) |
|---|---|---|---|
A | 01000001 | a | 01100001 |
B | 01000010 | b | 01100010 |
M | 01001101 | m | 01101101 |
Z | 01011010 | z | 01111010 |
0 | 00110000 | 9 | 00111001 |
| space | 00100000 | ! | 00100001 |
Notice the structure: uppercase letters all begin 010, lowercase all begin
011, and digits all begin 0011. The last five bits give the position
within the group. Once you see that, reading short binary strings by eye becomes easy.
Why computers use base 2 at all
Because a physical component can reliably hold two states — charged or not, high voltage or low, magnetised one way or the other — and struggles to hold ten. Everything above that is convention: which bit patterns mean which characters, how many bits make a unit, and what order the bytes go in. Binary itself is just counting with two symbols instead of ten.
Some things binary is not
- Not encryption. It is fully reversible by anyone. If a puzzle uses binary as its “code”, the puzzle is a lookup, not a cipher.
- Not machine code. Machine instructions are also binary, but a completely different mapping — decoding an executable as text gives gibberish.
- Not one universal standard. The same bits mean different characters in ASCII, EBCDIC and UTF-16. The mapping has to be agreed in advance.
Choosing the settings
Leave the character set on UTF-8 unless you are working through an exercise that specifies 7-bit ASCII. Leave the separator on spaces for anything a human will read — unspaced binary is unreadable past about three characters, and impossible to proofread. Set it to “none” only when a machine is going to consume the output.
Puzzle and homework tips
If a decoded message comes out as garbage, count the digits first: the total must divide by 8 (or 7). If it divides by neither, a digit was dropped in transcription. If it divides by both and only one produces readable text, you have found the right group size. And if the plaintext looks like more encoded data — a run of hex characters, or a Base64-looking string — you are probably one layer into a multi-stage puzzle.
Questions
How does it know which way to translate?
If everything you paste is 0, 1 and whitespace, it decodes. Anything else is encoded. You can always override the guess with the swap button.
Why did my text of just zeros and ones get decoded?
Because that is indistinguishable from binary. Use swap to force the encode direction — the guess is a convenience, not a rule.
What does 01001000 mean?
It is 72 in decimal, which is the capital letter H in ASCII and UTF-8. Reading right to left the place values are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 — and here only the 64 and 8 columns are set.
Can I use this for homework where the answer must be 7-bit?
Yes. Switch the character set to ASCII and pick 7 bits per character; the groups then match the classic ASCII table exactly.