ASCII Converter

What is the ASCII Converter?

The ASCII Converter is a free two-way tool that translates plain text into ASCII character codes and turns those codes back into readable text. It works in both directions on a single page: type a sentence to see its codes, or paste a list of codes to rebuild the original message. You can show each code as decimal, hexadecimal, binary, or octal, which means it also doubles as a text to binary converter and a binary to text decoder.

How to use it

1. Pick a direction: Text to ASCII to turn words into codes, or ASCII to Text to turn codes back into words.
2. For Text to ASCII, type or paste your text and choose a number base — decimal, hex, binary, or octal.
3. Optionally set a separator and toggle zero-padding so every code lines up at a fixed width.
4. For ASCII to Text, paste your codes; the decoder accepts spaces, commas, or new lines and can auto-detect binary, hex, and decimal.
5. Tap Copy to grab the result. One glance, done — no sign-up, nothing to install.

The method behind it

Every character on a keyboard maps to a number defined by the ASCII standard and its superset, Unicode. The capital letter A is code 65, lowercase a is 97, and a space is 32. To encode, the tool reads each character, looks up its code point, and writes that number in the base you chose. To decode, it reverses the process — each code is parsed back into a number and rendered as its character. Because it walks the text by Unicode code point, characters beyond plain ASCII (including emoji) round-trip correctly.

Examples

• Text Hi to ASCII (decimal) gives 72 105.
• Text Hi to ASCII (binary) gives 01001000 01101001 — this is the text to binary path.
• ASCII codes 72 101 108 108 111 decode back to Hello.
• Binary 01000010 01111001 01100101 decodes back to Bye.

ASCII reference table

Common use cases

• Students learning how ASCII, character codes, and binary representation work.
• Developers debugging encoding issues, escape sequences, or stray control characters.
• Anyone decoding a string of binary or hex from a puzzle, CTF challenge, or log file.
• Quickly building a text to binary message for a project, art piece, or classroom demo.
• Inspecting exactly which code points a piece of text contains.

Why use this one

Most pages only go one direction, or only handle binary, forcing you to bounce between separate tools. This converter does both directions and four number bases on one screen, supports a text to binary mode plus binary to text decoding, lets you choose separators and padding, and runs entirely in your browser so your text never leaves the page. When you need a related conversion, try our Number Base Converter, Base64 Encode & Decode, or URL Encode & Decode tools.

Frequently asked questions