About

Every character in a text string maps to a numeric code point defined by the ASCII standard (American Standard Code for Information Interchange, ANSI X3.4-1986). That code point is a base-10 integer, but hardware, protocols, and file formats frequently require the value expressed in base-2, base-8, or base-16. Getting the radix wrong in a network packet header or a memory dump causes silent data corruption. This tool converts each character's code point into any radix from 2 to 36, applying consistent zero-padding so every token occupies the same width. It handles the full byte range 0 - 255 (extended ASCII / Latin-1). Note: characters above code point 127 fall outside strict 7-bit ASCII and follow ISO 8859-1 mapping.

Formulas

The conversion from a text character to its representation in base b follows two steps. First, extract the character's code point. Then, express that integer in the target radix by repeated division.

c = charCodeAt(char)

The code point c is then converted to base b using the standard positional decomposition:

c = n∑i=0 d_i ⋅ bⁱ

where each digit d_i is the remainder of successive division:

d_i = c mod b , c ← ⌊cb⌋

Digits are collected least-significant first, then reversed. For remainders ≥ 10, the standard convention maps 10 → A, 11 → B, … 35 → Z.

Padding width w for a full byte is: w = ⌈8log₂(b)⌉. For base 2: w = 8. For base 8: w = 3. For base 16: w = 2.

Where c = code point (integer), b = target base/radix (2 - 36), d_i = digit at position i, w = zero-pad width.

Reference Data

Char	Dec	Hex	Oct	Binary	Description
NUL	0	00	000	00000000	Null
TAB	9	09	011	00001001	Horizontal Tab
LF	10	0A	012	00001010	Line Feed
CR	13	0D	015	00001101	Carriage Return
SP	32	20	040	00100000	Space
!	33	21	041	00100001	Exclamation Mark
0	48	30	060	00110000	Digit Zero
9	57	39	071	00111001	Digit Nine
A	65	41	101	01000001	Latin Capital A
Z	90	5A	132	01011010	Latin Capital Z
a	97	61	141	01100001	Latin Small a
z	122	7A	172	01111010	Latin Small z
~	126	7E	176	01111110	Tilde
DEL	127	7F	177	01111111	Delete
£	163	A3	243	10100011	Pound Sign (ISO 8859-1)
©	169	A9	251	10101001	Copyright Sign
°	176	B0	260	10110000	Degree Sign
µ	181	B5	265	10110101	Micro Sign
€	8364	20AC	20254	10000010101100	Euro Sign (Unicode)

Frequently Asked Questions

Strict ASCII covers code points 0 - 127 (7-bit). This tool uses JavaScript's charCodeAt, which returns the UTF-16 code unit. For Latin-1 characters (128-255), the values match ISO 8859-1. For characters like the Euro sign (€, code point 8364), the converter produces a correct base-b representation of that larger integer, but the result exceeds a single byte. The output label will flag any code points above 255.

Without padding, the letter "A" (code point 65) renders as 1000001 in binary - 7 digits. Protocols and memory layouts expect 8-bit octets: 01000001. Inconsistent widths cause alignment errors when parsing concatenated streams. Hex similarly expects 2 digits per byte. This tool pads based on the formula w = ⌈8 ÷ log₂(b)⌉.

Base 2 (binary) for hardware registers, bit masks, and network protocol fields. Base 8 (octal) for Unix file permissions (e.g., 755). Base 10 (decimal) for human-readable code point tables. Base 16 (hexadecimal) for memory addresses, color codes, and byte-level inspection. Base 36 is used for compact URL-safe identifiers (digits 0 - 9 plus letters A - Z).

Control characters (code points 0 - 31 and 127) are valid ASCII. They are converted normally. In the output, they are represented by their numeric value in the target base. The character breakdown table labels them with standard abbreviations (TAB, LF, CR, NUL) so you can identify non-printable characters in your input.

Yes. The tool includes a reverse mode. Paste the base-encoded values (space-separated), select the same base, and convert back to text. The parser splits on the chosen separator, interprets each token as an integer in the specified radix via parseInt(token, b), and maps each integer back to a character with String.fromCharCode. If any token produces NaN, the tool flags it as an invalid token rather than silently dropping it.

The tool accepts up to 10,000 characters. Beyond that, the DOM rendering of potentially 80,000 binary digits can degrade scroll performance. For bulk conversion of files, a command-line tool like xxd or od is more appropriate. This limit is a deliberate trade-off between browser responsiveness and utility.