What is binary code?

Binary code represents data using only two digits: 0 and 1. In computing, each character of text is stored as a sequence of binary digits (bits). Using standard ASCII or UTF-8 encoding, each character maps to a specific binary number. For example, the letter 'A' is represented as 01000001 in 8-bit binary.

Common use cases for text to binary conversion

Text to binary conversion is used in computer science education to teach how computers store data, in programming challenges and CTF competitions, for encoding messages in binary format, and in understanding character encoding systems like ASCII and UTF-8. It is also useful for debugging data transmission issues at the bit level.

// JavaScript — text to binary
function textToBinary(text) {
  return [...text]
    .map(c => c.charCodeAt(0).toString(2).padStart(8, '0'))
    .join(' ');
}
textToBinary('Hi'); // '01001000 01101001'

# Python — text to binary
def text_to_binary(text):
    return ' '.join(format(ord(c), '08b') for c in text)
text_to_binary('Hi')  # '01001000 01101001'