Text to Binary Converter
Convert any text to binary code (0s and 1s) and back.
See the ASCII value of each character instantly.
What Is Binary?
Binary is the fundamental number system used by all digital computers. Where the decimal system uses ten digits (0–9), binary uses only two: 0 and 1. These correspond to the two physical states of a transistor: off (0) and on (1). Every piece of text, image, video, or software on any computer ultimately reduces to sequences of these two values.
How ASCII Encoding Works
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was established in 1963 and assigns a number from 0 to 127 to each common character. The letter ‘A’ is 65, ‘a’ is 97, ‘0’ is 48, and the space character is 32. When you type the letter ‘H’, your computer stores the number 72 — and that number is stored in binary as 01001000.
Each binary group of 8 digits is called a byte. One byte can represent 256 different values (2⁸ = 256). Standard ASCII uses only 7 of those 8 bits (0–127), but extended ASCII and modern encoding use the full byte.
Binary to Decimal Conversion
Reading a binary number like 01000001 (the letter ‘A’ = 65):
Each position has a place value that is a power of 2, reading right to left: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. Add up the values where there is a 1: 64 + 1 = 65. That is ‘A’.
Beyond ASCII: Unicode and UTF-8
ASCII handles only 128 characters — enough for English but not for the world’s languages. Unicode assigns a unique number (called a code point) to over 140,000 characters, covering every living language, historical script, and emoji. UTF-8 is the most common encoding: it uses 1 byte for ASCII-compatible characters and 2–4 bytes for everything else. When you see binary today in real computer systems, it almost always uses UTF-8, not plain ASCII.
Why Everything Is Binary
Electronic circuits operate on voltage — either high (1) or low (0). This two-state system is extremely reliable: it is easy to distinguish “high” from “low,” even with electrical noise. A 10-state system (decimal) would require extremely precise voltage measurements and would be far more error-prone. Binary keeps computers simple, fast, and reliable at the hardware level.