Text to ASCII codes — decimal, hex, binary or octal

How to use the text to ASCII converter

1. Choose the Direction: Text → codes or Codes → text.
2. Pick the Number base: Decimal, Hex, Binary or Octal. This applies in both directions.
3. When encoding, choose a Separator: Space or Comma.
4. Type into Your text and read the Result.

What it does and when to use it

Every character a computer stores has a number. ASCII, the 1960s American standard, fixed the numbers 0 to 127 for English letters, digits, punctuation and control codes, and Unicode kept them unchanged as its first block. This tool shows those numbers. It helps when you debug a string that looks right but does not match, spot a hidden tab (9) or carriage return (13), solve a puzzle written in numbers, or write char values in code.

For whole bytes rather than character numbers, the binary text converter and the octal text converter work on UTF-8 bytes. For escape formats such as U+00E9 or é, use text to Unicode code points. If your puzzle uses 1 for A and 26 for Z instead, that is the A1Z26 cipher.

How it works

Text → codes. The tool walks through the text one character at a time and writes each character’s code point in the chosen base. Hex digits are upper case. Numbers are not padded, so the space is 20 in hex and 100000 in binary. Spaces in your text are characters too, so they appear as 32 in the list. If any character is above 127, the note “characters outside ASCII (0–127) are shown as their Unicode code point” is added.

Codes → text. The input is split at spaces, commas, semicolons and line breaks. A leading 0x, 0b or 0o is removed. Each part must use only the digits of the chosen base, and the value must be a valid Unicode code point, otherwise the tool names the part it could not read. All of this happens in your browser.

Worked examples

Results from the tool:

Hi!                       Decimal          →  72 105 33
OK                        Binary           →  1001111 1001011
café                      Decimal, Comma   →  99, 97, 102, 233  (plus the non-ASCII note)
0x48 0x69  (Codes → text) Hex              →  Hi

The third line shows the note in action: c, a and f are plain ASCII, but é is 233, beyond the ASCII range. In the last line the 0x prefixes are stripped before the hex values 48 and 69 are read as H and i.

Limits and tips

• Emoji give one large number each, such as 1F600 in hex, not two surrogate halves.
• Decoding accepts numbers above 127, so it also works for any Unicode code point you paste.
• A mistyped digit stops the decode with a message such as “1x” is not a valid base-10 character code. Fix that part and the rest decodes.