Binary ↔ Text Converter

Each character is mapped to a number using a standard encoding (ASCII or Unicode/UTF-8), then that number is stored as binary. The letter 'A' is ASCII 65, which is 01000001 in 8-bit binary. UTF-8 extends this to support all world scripts using 1–4 bytes per character.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit encoding standard from 1963 that maps 128 characters — letters, digits, punctuation, and control codes — to numbers 0–127. It is the foundation of all modern text encoding.

ASCII covers only 128 characters (English alphabet + basics). UTF-8 is backward-compatible with ASCII for the first 128 values but extends to all 1.1 million Unicode code points using multi-byte sequences. UTF-8 is now the dominant encoding on the web (98%+ of websites).

Modern computers use 8 bits (1 byte) as the minimum addressable unit. ASCII only needs 7 bits (128 values), but bytes are stored with a leading zero for the 8th bit. Extended ASCII and the first 256 UTF-8 characters use all 8 bits.