# Binary to Text

Convert binary, hex, octal or decimal back into text. Reads separated or unseparated input and reports bytes that are not valid UTF-8.

Canonical page: https://filetity.com/binary-to-text

## Capabilities

- Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
- Account required: No. There is no account system.
- Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
- Formats: Binary, hexadecimal, octal or decimal in, separated or not, with 0x and 0b prefixes ignored. Text out.
- Limits: Values above 255 cannot be UTF-8 bytes and are reported as such, with a suggestion to read them as code points instead.
- Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
- Offline: Yes, once the page has loaded. The tool keeps working with no network connection.

## Questions

### Does my binary need spaces between the bytes?

No. A continuous run is split into groups of eight, and hexadecimal into pairs, which is unambiguous because every byte is padded to a fixed width. Spaces, commas, semicolons and pipes all work as separators if your input has them.

### Why does it say my bytes are not valid UTF-8?

Because they decode individually but do not form characters. A byte like C3 starts a two byte sequence and needs a continuation byte after it, so C3 followed by something else is not text. Most converters return replacement marks here and look like they worked; this says so instead.

### What if a number is bigger than 255?

Then it is not a byte, and it is almost certainly a code point. The page says so and suggests switching, because a value like 128512 is a perfectly good character number and a completely impossible byte.

### Will it handle 0x and 0b prefixes?

Yes, they are stripped before anything is read. Those turn up constantly in output copied from a debugger or a programming language, and having to remove them by hand first is exactly the sort of friction this should absorb.

### Can it read binary that came from another tool?

Usually, and the thing to check is what the other tool counted. If it produced one number per character rather than per byte, switch to code points here. If the numbers are eight digits each, it counted bytes and the default is right.

## Related tools

- [Text to Binary](https://filetity.com/text-to-binary): Convert text to binary, hex, octal or decimal as UTF-8 bytes.
- [Base64 decode and encode](https://filetity.com/base64-decode): Decode base64 to text, or encode text to base64, without leaving the page.