Binary to Text Converter

Paste a binary string and the converter decodes it back to readable text. Binary in groups of 8 (one byte per character) becomes ASCII or UTF-8 text; the parser handles whitespace and common separators (commas, hyphens) gracefully so you can paste output from any source.

Going the other way (text to binary) works in the same tool — type plain text, get binary back. Useful for novelty puzzles, classroom exercises, or sanity-checking why a serialization layer is producing bytes that look one way but parse differently downstream.

The converter assumes UTF-8 by default. For legacy ASCII-only or extended Latin-1 input, the result is the same in the 7-bit range but diverges for byte values 128-255 — switch to the encoding the source actually used for accurate decoding.

Under the hood: split input on whitespace and common separators, validate each chunk is exactly 8 characters of 0s and 1s, parse each as an unsigned 8-bit integer, accumulate into a Uint8Array, then decode as UTF-8 via TextDecoder. The reverse direction iterates code units of the input string, encodes via TextEncoder to bytes, and formats each byte as 8-character binary with leading zeros. Multi-byte UTF-8 characters produce multiple bytes (and multiple binary groups) per character — the encoder handles the length-prefix logic, you don't have to.

Worked example: paste '01001000 01101001'. Two bytes: 72 and 105. ASCII 72 is 'H', 105 is 'i'. Output: 'Hi'. Now try a UTF-8 emoji: rocket emoji is U+1F680, which encodes as four bytes in UTF-8 (0xF0 0x9F 0x9A 0x80) → binary '11110000 10011111 10011010 10000000'. Paste those four groups and you get the rocket back. Going the other way: type 'Hello' → output '01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111' (5 bytes, each 8 bits). Add a non-ASCII character like 'é' and you'll see two bytes (UTF-8: 0xC3 0xA9), which is 16 bits in the binary output.

Where it surprises people: binary length doesn't equal character count once non-ASCII enters the picture. A 10-character ASCII string is 80 bits. Replace one character with an emoji and you might be at 104 bits (10 chars - 1 ASCII + 4 emoji bytes × 8). For accurate byte-count math, the rule is: ASCII = 1 byte, common Latin accents = 2 bytes, most Asian scripts = 3 bytes, emoji = 4 bytes. Or just look at the byte count after encoding — TextEncoder tells you the truth.