Text to Binary

Text as ones and zeros

Converting text to binary shows the raw bits a computer stores for each character. First each character maps to a number through a character encoding, then that number is written in base 2. For plain English in UTF-8, every character is one byte, shown as eight bits.

The encoding decides the bytes

The letter A is code point 65, which is 01000001 in binary. ASCII and UTF-8 agree for the first 128 characters, so basic Latin text looks the same in both. The moment you include a non-ASCII character, UTF-8 uses two to four bytes for it, while other encodings differ entirely. Binary is meaningless without knowing the encoding.

Example

"Hi" in UTF-8:
H = 72 = 01001000
i = 105 = 01101001

"é" in UTF-8 is two bytes:
11000011 10101001

The accented é expands to two bytes because it lives beyond the single-byte range, and UTF-8 marks multi-byte sequences with leading bits like 110 on the first byte.

Grouping and padding

Bits are conventionally grouped into bytes of eight, padded with leading zeros so 5 shows as 00000101, not 101. Without consistent padding and spacing, a binary string is ambiguous about where one character ends and the next begins.

FAQ

Why is one character more than eight bits? It is outside the ASCII range, so UTF-8 encodes it as multiple bytes. To inspect the exact code point, try the Unicode lookup.

Can I decode binary without knowing the encoding? You can turn bits into numbers, but mapping those numbers back to characters needs the right encoding, usually UTF-8.

Why does my decode fail on odd-length input? Each character needs a whole number of bytes. Stray bits or missing padding break the grouping.