See text as binary, hex, or octal bytes

What does あ actually become on the wire? UTF-8 bytes shown as 0s and 1s, hex pairs, or octal — and digit strings decoded back.

Tools used in this guide

The job

Debugging an encoding issue or learning what UTF-8 means starts with seeing the bytes. ASCII letters take one byte each; a Japanese character takes three — the difference is visible the moment you look at binary or hex.

How to do it

Type text and pick binary (8 bits per byte), hex (two digits per byte) or octal (three). To go the other way, paste the digits — spaced groups or one contiguous string — and decode.

Hex is the compact debugging view: one byte per pair, easy to match against a hexdump.
Decoding is strict UTF-8 — bytes that are not valid text are rejected rather than printed as.

Worked example

Encoding あ shows three hex bytes e3 81 82 — the UTF-8 three-byte form for U+3042 — while A stays a single 41. The difference explains why byte-length limits hit Japanese text three times harder.

Limits

This is byte representation, not encryption or compression — the mapping is reversible by anyone. Decode is text-only: arbitrary binary data that is not valid UTF-8 is refused. For binary files, use a hex dump or the Base64 tools instead.