How many bits is one character?

In UTF-8, ASCII characters use 1 byte (8 bits), while other characters use 2 to 4 bytes. For example, an emoji usually takes 4 bytes, or 32 bits.

What is "A" in binary?

The letter A is code point 65, which is 01000001 in 8-bit binary. Lowercase a is 97, or 01100001.

Text to Binary Converter (and Binary to Text)

Encode text as eight-bit binary or decode binary back into text locally.

About Text to Binary

Convert text to binary by encoding it as UTF-8 and writing each byte as eight bits, separated by spaces, commas, new lines or nothing. In the other direction, paste 8-bit groups (spaces, commas and newlines between them are ignored) to decode them back into UTF-8 text, with an error if the bit count is not a multiple of 8 or the bytes are not valid UTF-8.

Common uses

See how characters, including emoji, are represented as bytes and bits.
Decode a binary message from a puzzle, CTF or class exercise.
Create binary-encoded text for teaching or fun.

FAQ

How many bits is one character?: In UTF-8, ASCII characters use 1 byte (8 bits), while other characters use 2 to 4 bytes. For example, an emoji usually takes 4 bytes, or 32 bits.
What is "A" in binary?: The letter A is code point 65, which is 01000001 in 8-bit binary. Lowercase a is 97, or 01100001.