Binary translator

How text becomes binary

Computers store each character as a number. In ASCII, H is 72 and i is 105. Write those numbers in base 2, padded to eight digits, and you have binary: 01001000 01101001 is “Hi”. Each group of eight bits is one byte.

Decoding binary

1. Split the bits into groups of eight. The translator does this for you if they're run together.
2. Convert each group to a number. Each position, from the right, is worth 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. Add up the positions that hold a 1.
3. Look the number up. 65–90 are capital letters, 97–122 lowercase, 48–57 digits, and 32 is a space.

Characters beyond basic ASCII (accents, symbols, emoji) are stored in UTF-8 as two to four bytes. The translator encodes and decodes those correctly too.

When it doesn't decode

• The bit count isn't a multiple of 8. The puzzle might use 5-bit groups, where A=00000. That's Bacon's cipher written in 0s and 1s.
• It decodes to letters that don't read. There's a second layer. Paste the output into the cipher identifier.
• It's 7-bit ASCII. Older systems dropped the leading zero. Put a 0 at the front of each group of seven and try again.