Text Encoding Converter

Encoding transforms data into another representation using a publicly known scheme — there is no secret key involved, and the process is fully reversible by anyone. Encryption scrambles data using a secret key, so only someone with the key can reverse it. Base64 and hex are encodings; AES and RSA are encryption algorithms.

Base64 encodes every 3 input bytes into 4 output characters. When the input length is not divisible by 3, one or two = characters are added as padding to make the output a multiple of 4 characters. One = means 1 padding byte was added; two == means 2 were added. Some implementations omit padding — both forms are valid if the decoder handles it.

ASCII is a 7-bit encoding that covers 128 characters (A-Z, 0-9, common punctuation). Unicode is a character repertoire standard covering over 140,000 characters across all writing systems. UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 are different ways to encode Unicode code points as bytes — UTF-8 is backward-compatible with ASCII for the first 128 code points.

Hex (Base16) represents each byte as two hexadecimal characters, which is verbose but instantly human-readable for technical inspection — handy for debugging byte streams, cryptographic keys, and binary protocol values. Base64 is roughly 33% more compact and is preferred when transmitting binary data in JSON, email, or URLs.

U+XXXX is the standard notation for a Unicode code point, where XXXX is a hexadecimal number. For example, U+0041 is the Latin capital letter A, and U+4E2D is the Chinese character 中. Code points range from U+0000 to U+10FFFF. The U+ prefix was introduced by the Unicode Consortium to distinguish code points from byte values.