Understanding Binary, Hex, and Other Number Systems
What this converter does
Computers store every character and number as bits, but people read those bits in several different notations depending on the task. This tool takes text or a number and shows it at once as text, binary, hexadecimal, decimal, octal, and Base64, so you can move between the notation a debugger prints, the one a color value uses, and the one a person can actually read. Paste your input and it detects which format you gave it — or you pick the input format yourself — and fills in the other five.
When to use it
Hex and binary come up constantly in low-level work: reading a memory dump, checking a byte in a network packet, decoding a color like #41 in an RGB channel, or working out what an ASCII code stands for. Decimal and octal are handy when you are matching values against documentation or Unix file permissions, and Base64 appears whenever binary data has to travel through a text-only channel such as an email header or a data URI. Having all six side by side saves the mental arithmetic of converting one pair at a time.
Example: the letter A
Take a single character, the capital letter A. Its ASCII code is 65 in decimal, which is 0x41 in hex, 01000001 in binary, and 101 in octal. Type A into the tool and every one of those appears together; type 0x41 or 01000001 instead and you get the letter A back. This is the difference between the character and its numeric code — 'A' is the glyph, while 65 is the value the machine actually stores for it.
Notes and options
A byte is eight bits, so binary output is grouped into 8-bit chunks and hex into pairs of digits, which keeps long values readable. You can choose the separator between groups — space, comma, newline, or none — switch hex between uppercase (FF) and lowercase (ff), and turn the 0x and 0b prefixes on or off to match your target syntax. When you feed in a number rather than text, it is treated as a numeric value across bases; when you feed in text, each character is encoded by its code point. Copy any single field, or use Copy All to export every representation as one JSON object.