Free Binary / Hex Converter Online
Convert text to binary or hexadecimal and back. See the binary representation of any character, or decode a binary or hex string back to readable text.
At the hardware level, computers represent every character as a number, and every number as a sequence of binary digits (bits). ASCII assigns a number from 0 to 127 to each printable character; Unicode extends this to cover every writing system. Hexadecimal is a compact way to write binary data — one hex digit represents exactly four bits, so a full byte is two hex digits. This converter translates any text string into its binary representation (space-separated 8-bit groups, one per character) and into hexadecimal, and decodes binary or hex back to text.
Binary / Hex Converter
How to use this binary / hex converter
- Select the direction: Text→Binary, Binary→Text, Text→Hex, or Hex→Text.
- Paste your input into the input box.
- Click Convert to see the result.
- Click Copy to put the output on your clipboard.
Common use cases
- Seeing the binary or hex representation of characters to understand character encoding
- Checking the byte values of a string when debugging a binary protocol or file format
- Encoding a short message in binary for a puzzle, quiz, or educational exercise
- Understanding why a character outside the ASCII range takes more than one byte
Frequently asked questions
Why does an emoji produce so many binary groups?
Emojis are encoded in UTF-8 as multiple bytes — typically 3 or 4. Each byte becomes one 8-bit binary group. The number of groups equals the UTF-8 byte count of the input, not the character count.
What encoding does this use?
UTF-8. ASCII characters are represented as a single byte. Non-ASCII characters use 2 to 4 bytes.
What is the relationship between binary and hex?
Each hex digit represents exactly four bits. The hex digit A (10 in decimal) is always 1010 in binary. The byte 0xFF (255 in decimal) is 11111111 in binary — two F digits, eight 1-bits.
Can this handle binary that was not generated from text?
The tool interprets binary and hex as UTF-8 text bytes. If the binary represents something other than text (like an image header), the decoded output will be garbled. This tool is for text encoding.