Text → binary
| Text | Binary |
|---|---|
| Hi | 01001000 01101001 |
| OK | 01001111 01001011 |
| Hello | 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 |
| I love you | 01001001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 |
| Hé 😀 | 01001000 11000011 10101001 00100000 11110000 10011111 10011000 10000000 |
Letters in binary
Each capital letter, then its lowercase byte. They differ only in the third digit, which is worth 32.
How text becomes binary
Computers store each character as one or more bytes, and a byte is eight binary digits, or bits. In UTF-8, the encoding almost every website uses, English letters, digits and punctuation take one byte each: A is 01000001 (65) and a is 01100001 (97). An accented letter like é takes two bytes, and most emoji take four.
Reading binary by hand
Each of the eight places is worth twice the one to its right: 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1. Add up the places that hold a 1: 01001000 is 64 + 8 = 72, the code for H.
To read a message, tap the swap button and paste it in. Bytes can be separated by spaces or written as one long string, which is split every eight digits. Groups of seven digits, as in old ASCII charts, work too.
Binary, ASCII and UTF-8
ASCII is the older code for English characters, with 128 values. UTF-8 keeps every ASCII character at the same value, so for plain English this gives the same result as an ASCII-to-binary converter, padded to eight digits, and it also covers every other language and emoji.