CoderTools

Text Encoding Converter

Convert text between Hex, Binary, Unicode and more encoding formats

Byte Delimiter:
Add Prefix:

Encoding Converter Documentation

What is Character Encoding?

Character encoding is a system that maps characters to numbers that computers can process. Different encoding schemes are used for different purposes such as storing, transmitting, or displaying text data. Common encodings include ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.

Supported Formats

Hexadecimal (Hex)

Hexadecimal representation using digits 0-9 and letters A-F. Each byte is represented by two hex characters. Widely used in programming and debugging.

Binary

Binary representation using only 0 and 1. Each byte is represented by 8 bits. This is the fundamental data representation used by computers.

Unicode Escape

Unicode escape sequences in \uXXXX format, commonly used in programming languages like JavaScript and JSON to represent Unicode characters.

HTML Entity

HTML entity encoding, including named entities (like &) and numeric entities (like & or &). Used to safely display special characters in HTML.

Punycode

Encoding scheme for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). Converts Unicode characters to ASCII-compatible encoding, prefixed with xn--.

Common Use Cases

  • View hexadecimal or binary representation of characters during debugging
  • Handle data encoding in network protocols
  • Analyze and fix encoding issues (mojibake)
  • Use Unicode escape sequences in code
  • Handle Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)
  • Character escaping in HTML/XML

Character Set vs Encoding Format

Character set and encoding format are two different concepts. A character set defines which characters are used in text (such as ASCII, GB2312, GBK, Unicode, etc.), while an encoding format defines how these characters are stored in a computer (such as UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.). For example, the same text can be encoded using GB2312 character set as GB2312 encoding, or using Unicode character set as UTF-8.

If you need to convert between different character sets (such as GBK, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, etc.) rather than just changing the encoding format, please use the Character Set Converter tool.

Related Tools

Quick Menu

No recent tools