How Computers Store Text

At the hardware level, computers know only two states — on and off — represented as binary digits, or bits. To store text, every character is assigned a number, and that number is written in binary. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) assigns the numbers 0 through 127 to the letters, digits, and punctuation of English: the capital letter A is 65, which in eight-bit binary is 01000001. A string like "Hello" is therefore stored as five consecutive bytes: 72, 101, 108, 108, 111 — or in binary, 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111.

Modern systems use Unicode and the UTF-8 encoding, which preserves ASCII as a compatible subset and extends it to cover every writing system on earth. Characters beyond 127 — accented letters, Greek, Cyrillic, and emoji — occupy two, three, or even four bytes, which is why a text's byte count can exceed its character count. This converter shows both the character count and the byte count so the difference becomes visible, and it renders each character's decimal, hexadecimal, and eight-bit binary representation side by side.

Reading and Writing Binary

Hexadecimal is the practical shorthand programmers use for binary data, because each byte maps to exactly two hex digits: 01000001 is 0x41, and 01101100 is 0x6C. Reading a byte in hex takes half the effort of reading eight bits. This tool works in both directions: type text to see its binary and hex encodings, or paste binary groups to decode them back into readable characters. Spaces between bit groups are ignored and incomplete final groups are padded with leading zeros, so messy pastes still decode cleanly.