Binary to ASCII Converter
Paste binary and this tool translates it to readable ASCII text. It also works in reverse — hit the swap button to turn ASCII text back into binary. Binary is usually written in 8-bit groups (bytes) separated by spaces, and each byte maps to one character in the ASCII table.
How binary to ASCII conversion works
Computers store text as numbers, and those numbers are stored in binary (base 2). ASCII assigns each character a number from 0 to 127, and that number is written as 8 binary digits (bits), called a byte.
To convert binary to text, you split the binary into 8-bit groups, read each group as a number, then look that number up in the ASCII table. To go the other way, you take each character's ASCII code and write it as 8 bits. The converter above does both — paste binary to decode, or paste text and swap the direction to encode.
Worked example
Take the binary string for the word "Hi". The letter H is ASCII code 72 and i is 105. Written as bytes:
H = 72 = 01001000 i = 105 = 01101001 01001000 01101001 -> Hi
Common uses
Binary-to-ASCII conversion shows up in computer science homework, capture-the-flag and puzzle challenges, low-level debugging, and anywhere you receive data as raw bits and need to see the text it represents.
If your binary uses a separator other than spaces, or is one long unbroken string, group it into 8-bit chunks first. A leftover group that is not 8 bits long usually means a stray character or a different bit width (such as 7-bit ASCII without the leading zero).