Text to Binary

Binary of what, exactly

There is no binary of a letter. There is binary of a number, and characters become numbers through a character encoding. "A" is 65 in ASCII, so it is 01000001 in eight bits. Change the encoding and the bits change. This is why "convert text to binary" is an incomplete instruction until the encoding is named, and why two tools can disagree about the same input.

ASCII stops at 127

Original ASCII defines 128 characters and fits in seven bits, conventionally padded to eight. It covers unaccented English letters, digits and common punctuation, and nothing else. Every accented letter, currency symbol other than the dollar, emoji and non-Latin script falls outside it. A converter that produces exactly eight bits per character is doing ASCII or an eight-bit extension of it, and will mangle anything beyond that range.

UTF-8 is variable width

UTF-8 encodes ASCII characters in one byte, so plain English text is byte-identical to ASCII. Beyond that it uses two, three or four bytes: é is two, most CJK characters are three, and emoji are four. So a five-character string can be five bytes or twenty. If your binary output has more groups than the text has characters, that is UTF-8 working correctly, not a fault.

Big-endian, little-endian and UTF-16

UTF-16 encodes most characters in two bytes, and the order of those two bytes differs between systems. A byte order mark at the start signals which. Converting to UTF-16 without recording endianness produces output that decodes to garbage on the other convention, which is one of the more confusing ways for text to break.

Spaces between bytes are for humans

The grouping into eight-bit chunks separated by spaces is a display convention. The actual data is an unbroken bit stream, and the receiver knows where boundaries fall from the encoding rules, not from whitespace. Pasting binary with inconsistent grouping into a decoder is a common source of failure.

This is not encryption

Binary is a representation, not a protection. Anyone can decode it instantly, and it is trivially recognisable as encoded text. It is useful for teaching, for low-level debugging and for understanding how encoding works — never for concealing anything.