Why do the character and byte counts differ?

Because UTF-8 and UTF-16 spend different numbers of bytes on different characters, and astral characters cost more in both. A Latin letter is one byte and one code unit; an emoji is four bytes, two code units and one code point. The table reports all three so the relevant one can be chosen.

What is a CSS escape for?

It lets a stylesheet name a character by code point, which is how a generated content declaration can carry a glyph that would be awkward to type or unsafe to store in the file. The escape is a backslash followed by the hexadecimal value and a terminating space.

Why does the JavaScript escape look different for some characters?

Because characters above the basic plane cannot be written as a single four-digit escape. They need the braced form, which takes the full code point, and that syntax only exists in engines that support it. For older targets the value has to be written as a surrogate pair instead.

When would I need percent-encoding?

Whenever a character travels in a URL, a query parameter, or a form field. The percent-encoded form is what the request actually carries, and seeing it beside the code point explains why a URL with a space or an accent often needs to be written differently from how it reads.

Can I convert a long text?

The table covers the first two hundred characters, which is enough for a symbol lookup or a short string and deliberately short for prose. Converting a whole document is a job for a script, and what the tool provides is the reference for the handful of characters that need attention.

Character Code Converter

Input

Text or single character

Characters4

UTF-8 bytes10

UTF-16 code units5

characters: 4 · code points: 4 · UTF-8 bytes: 10

Emoji and rare CJK live above U+FFFF: they take two UTF-16 code units but one code point, which is why the two counts differ whenever the text contains them.

Encodings

Char	Code point	Decimal	HTML entity	CSS escape	UTF-8 bytes	UTF-16 units	Binary	%
A	U+0041	65	A	\0041	41	0041	01000001	A
é	U+00E9	233	é	\00E9	c3 a9	00E9	11101001	%C3%A9
→	U+2192	8594	→	\2192	e2 86 92	2192	10000110010010	%E2%86%92
😀	U+1F600	128512	😀	\1F600	f0 9f 98 80	D83D	11111011000000000	%F0%9F%98%80

HTML entity shown in hex form — decimal entities work everywhere too.

Copy-ready values

AU+0041\0041 \u0041

éU+00E9\00E9 \u00E9

→U+2192\2192 \u2192

😀U+1F600\1F600 \u{1F600}

Design-tool tracking reminder: 4 character(s) at 16px can add 1.28px of width at 0.02em tracking.

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The character code converter lists every encoding a character has, side by side: code point, decimal, HTML entity, CSS escape, JavaScript escape, UTF-8 bytes, UTF-16 units, percent-encoding and binary. It is the lookup table for anything that has to be written into code rather than typed.

What is Character Code Converter?

The character code converter takes a string and returns a table of encodings, one row per character, with the forms that different languages and file formats expect.

The columns are the useful part, and each exists because something in a codebase needs it.

The code point in hexadecimal and in decimal, which is how a character is specified in documentation and in most APIs.
The HTML entity in hexadecimal form, plus the CSS escape with its terminating space, which is the form that goes into a content declaration.
The JavaScript escape, which differs for characters above the basic multilingual plane since they need the braces form.
The UTF-8 byte sequence and the UTF-16 code units, which are the two byte-level counts that disagree about astral characters.
The percent-encoded form and the binary value of the code point, which cover URL work and the occasional bit-level check.

The implementation detail worth knowing is that the table iterates by code point rather than by UTF-16 unit. Characters above the basic plane — emoji, rare CJK ideographs — are represented in JavaScript as a surrogate pair, and a naive loop over the string would report two broken halves instead of one correct value. Iterating by code point reports the real code point, and the readouts make the difference plain: the character count, the UTF-8 byte count and the UTF-16 unit count are three different numbers, and they diverge as soon as the text contains anything outside the basic plane.

Below the table, the first six characters get copy-ready rows carrying the CSS escape and the JavaScript escape with a copy button, which is the workflow the tool is built around: find the character, take its escape, paste it into a stylesheet. One subtlety is handled there rather than left to chance, which is that a CSS escape is terminated by a space, so the copy button trims it; when the next character in a declaration is a hexadecimal digit, that space has to be put back or the escape absorbs the following character.

Four limits are worth knowing before the table is treated as a specification.

The conversion stops after the first two hundred characters, which is generous for a symbol lookup and short for a paragraph.
The entity column shows the hexadecimal form only, since decimal entities work everywhere and the named forms are a separate catalogue.
The binary column is the code point rather than the UTF-8 bytes, which is the common case for bit-level work but not the only reading of the word.
The table lists encodings character by character, so it does not describe a whole string's size on the wire once a transport encoding is involved.

What it does provide is the one thing documentation rarely collects in a single view: every form a character can take, side by side, so the right one can be copied rather than derived. Paste a character, take the form the destination expects, and move on.

How to use Character Code Converter

Paste the text or the single character into the input, then read the three counts to see whether anything sits outside the basic plane.
Find the character's row and choose the column the destination needs: entity for markup, escape for stylesheets, bytes for storage or headers.
Copy the escape from the ready-made row below the table rather than retyping it, and restore the terminating space if the next character is a hex digit.
Check the character count against the byte count when sizing storage or a request, since the two differ as soon as non-ASCII characters appear.

When to use Character Code Converter vs related tools

Reach for it when a character has to be written into a stylesheet, a template or a JSON payload rather than typed, when a string's length behaves unexpectedly because it contains astral characters, or when a byte count is needed for a header or a storage calculation. The side-by-side columns save a round of documentation. For identifying an unknown character the Unicode character explorer gives the block context, the emoji Unicode mapper handles multi-code-point emoji sequences, and the special character picker covers the punctuation characters with their named entities.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.