How to Convert English to Binary (and Back) Step by Step

Binary looks intimidating until you see the two-step rule behind it: every character has a number, and every number can be written in base 2. That is the entire trick.

Step 1 — character to number

Every character has a code point. In ASCII, uppercase A is 65 and the letters run to Z at 90; lowercase a is 97 through z at 122. A space is 32, a full stop is 46, and the digit 0 is 48.

Step 2 — number to base 2

Write eight place values — 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 — and mark a 1 wherever the value fits. For 72 (H): 64 fits leaving 8, 8 fits leaving 0. That gives 01001000. For 105 (i): 64 + 32 + 8 + 1 = 01101001. So "Hi" is 01001000 01101001.

Why case costs exactly one bit

65 is 01000001 and 97 is 01100001 — the difference is bit 6 alone. That is why flipping case in ASCII is a single bitwise operation, and why the gap between any uppercase letter and its lowercase twin is always 32.

Emoji and accents need more than one byte

Anything above code point 127 is encoded as two to four UTF-8 bytes. The letter é is two bytes, and most emoji are four. A translator that only handles single bytes will mangle them; the Binary Translator encodes the full UTF-8 sequence, so encode-then-decode returns exactly what you typed.

Decoding binary back to English

Split the string into groups of eight, convert each group back to a number, then look up the character. 01000011 01101111 01100100 01100101 is 67, 111, 100, 101 — "Code". If the total number of digits is not a multiple of eight, the input is truncated or has stray characters.

For anything longer than a word, paste it into the translator and check your working against the output.