Text to Binary, Morse & More

about this tool

Bytes, not characters

Binary, hex, octal and decimal all work on UTF-8 bytes rather than code points. That is what every other tool means by "the binary of this text", and it is what makes the round trip exact.

The difference shows up the moment the text is not plain English. The letter é is one character but two bytes, so it produces two units, and an emoji produces four. A tool that encodes code points instead would give a different answer and would not decode anywhere else.

Decoding is forgiving about how the input is written: extra spaces, commas between units and a 0x prefix are all accepted. It is strict about the result, though. Bytes that are not valid UTF-8 are reported rather than returned as replacement characters.

Reversing without breaking things

Reversing a string by character index tears apart anything built from more than one code unit. An emoji comes out as two pieces of a broken pair, and a family emoji, which is several emoji joined together, scatters completely.

This reverses by grapheme, meaning by character as a reader sees it, so emoji and accented letters survive intact.

Morse and the NATO alphabet

Morse uses the ITU table, with a space between letters and a slash between words. Case does not exist in Morse, so decoding returns lower case.

The NATO alphabet is for reading something aloud over a bad line: a serial number, a booking reference, a postcode. Each letter and digit has a word chosen to be hard to confuse with any other.

ROT13 and Caesar

Neither is encryption. ROT13 rotates letters by thirteen, which is exactly half the alphabet, so applying it twice returns the original text. It exists to hide a spoiler or a punchline from a casual glance, nothing more. A Caesar shift is the same idea with a number you choose, and is broken by trying all twenty-five.

For the encodings that carry data rather than curiosity, see Base64 and URL encode & decode. Real encryption is AES encrypt & decrypt. To find out what a character actually is rather than convert it — its code point, its script, and whether it is one of the invisible ones that break a comparison — use the Unicode character inspector. To see the bytes of a whole file rather than a line of text, open it in the hex viewer.

questions

What can it convert text into?

Binary, hexadecimal, octal, decimal, Unicode escapes, Morse code and the NATO phonetic alphabet, plus ROT13 and any Caesar shift, and reversed text. Every one of them converts back as well.

Why does one character become several bytes in binary?

Because text is encoded as UTF-8 first. Plain ASCII is one byte per character, but an accented letter is two and an emoji is four, so the binary for 'café' is longer than four groups.

Is ROT13 or a Caesar cipher actually encryption?

No. Both are letter substitutions with no key worth the name — ROT13 is its own inverse, and a Caesar shift has 25 possibilities to try. They hide a spoiler from a casual glance and nothing more. For real encryption use the AES tool.

Can it handle Morse code with numbers and punctuation?

Yes, letters, digits and common punctuation are all mapped, and decoding accepts the usual spacing. Morse has no case, so decoded text comes back in one case.

What is the NATO alphabet for?

Reading characters aloud without being misheard — Alfa, Bravo, Charlie. It is what you want when dictating a reference number or a licence key over a phone line.