Text to Binary

Turn text into 8-bit binary. Pick the character encoding. The reverse direction is binary to string.

Eight bits per byte, in the encoding you pick

Binary here means the bytes of the text, written as 8-bit groups. The character encoding decides those bytes. UTF-8 is the default. The letter A is 01000001 in UTF-8 and in ASCII. 中文 is six bytes in UTF-8 and four in GBK, so the bit string changes with the menu. The other direction, bits back to text, is binary to string.

How to use it

  1. Paste the text. This page does not read a file.
  2. Choose the character encoding. Use UTF-8 unless the other side named GBK, Big5, Shift_JIS or UTF-16.
  3. Leave “Space between bytes” on to read the groups. Turn it off when you need one continuous bit string.
  4. If the encoding cannot hold a character, the page reports that instead of inserting question marks. ASCII cannot hold 中文.

What the bits are

Each byte is eight digits, most significant bit first. A space separates bytes only when that option is on; it is not a data bit. Hex mode treats the box as hexadecimal bytes already, with spaces and 0x ignored, and an odd number of digits is an error. UTF-16 can include a byte-order mark depending on the encoding you pick; if a consumer does not want a BOM, pick the BE or LE form without BOM.

Where people use it

  • Teaching what a character becomes after it leaves Unicode.
  • Comparing UTF-8 and GBK for the same Chinese sentence.
  • Checking a bit string before it goes into a protocol exercise.

Questions

I already have bits and want the text.

Use binary to string. This page only goes from text to bits.

Why did ASCII fail on a normal sentence?

ASCII is seven-bit English letters, digits and a few marks. Accented letters and Chinese need UTF-8 or a legacy encoding that contains them.