Binary Translator

Computers store every character as a number, and every number as a string of bits: zeros and ones. To translate text to binary, the tool looks up each character’s number inUTF-8, the encoding used by almost every website, and writes each byte as eight binary digits.

To translate binary to text, it does the reverse: reads the digits eight at a time (or one group at a time, if you separated the bytes with spaces), turns each group into a byte, and decodes the bytes as UTF-8. If they do not form valid text, you get a clear error rather than a row of question marks.

Auto-detect treats anything made only of zeros, ones and spaces as binary, and everything else as text. Pick a direction yourself if you actually want the digits “101” turned into binary.

Capital and small letters differ by a single bit: A is 01000001 and a is01100001. That is why switching case was cheap for early computers, and why the third digit from the left is the one that changes.

Each of the eight positions in a byte is worth double the one to its right: 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1. Add up the positions that hold a 1. For 01001000 that is 64 + 8 = 72, which is the code for “H”. For 01101001 it is 64 + 32 + 8 + 1 = 105, the code for “i”.

The options change only how the binary is written. Space between bytesmakes it readable; turn it off for one unbroken string. Always 8 digits per byte keeps the leading zeros, so every byte lines up. Without spaces the zeros are always kept, because otherwise there would be no way to tell where one byte ends.