Binary to text and back
Convert text to binary code and binary back to text, bit by bit.
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Binary to text and back
Binary is how a computer actually stores text: every character becomes one or more bytes, and every byte becomes eight bits. Paste a sentence to see the zeros and ones behind it, or paste a string of binary and read the message back out. The direction is chosen for you — input made only of 0s, 1s and separators is decoded, anything else is encoded — and the result updates as you type.
Auto-detection is a guess, and one case is genuinely ambiguous: a digit string like 1010 is read as code and decodes to a character. If you meant the four digits themselves, set the direction to text to code and you get their binary instead. That is what the direction selector is for.
The separator shapes the output. A space between bytes is the readable default and what most binary translators produce. No separator gives the unbroken bit string used in file formats and protocol documentation. A custom separator takes whatever you type — a comma, a dash, or \n to put one byte per line. Switch the base to octal and each byte becomes three digits from 000 to 377, the notation behind chmod, older Unix tooling and \nnn escapes in C strings. UTF-8 covers every character, so an accented letter costs two bytes and an emoji four; ASCII is the strict 7-bit set and refuses anything above code 127 rather than quietly writing the wrong bytes.
Reading code back is deliberately tolerant, because real binary arrives messy. Whitespace and line breaks are ignored, 0b and 0o prefixes are dropped, and a seven-digit group is padded back into a byte. Stray letters are reported instead of skipped, so a corrupt paste never answers with a plausible wrong word. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.