Free Binary (Base 2) Encoder/Decoder

Electronic circuits have two reliable states: on and off, represented by 1 and 0. Binary arithmetic is simple and error-resistant with these two states. All complex data is built by combining many binary digits (bits).

Eight bits became standard because it can represent 256 values (2^8), enough for all ASCII characters plus extra. Historical reasons and hardware design also influenced this choice. Some early systems used different byte sizes.

Find the character ASCII code (A=65, B=66, etc.). Convert that number to binary by repeatedly dividing by 2 and reading remainders backwards. Pad to 8 bits. For A: 65 = 64+1 = 2^6+2^0 = 01000001.

Emojis use Unicode, which requires multiple bytes to represent over a million possible characters. UTF-8 encoding uses 1-4 bytes per character. ASCII uses one byte, but emojis often use 4 bytes (32 bits).

Binary encoding alone provides no security - it is easily reversible. However, XOR operations on binary data are used in many encryption algorithms. Binary is representation, not protection.

Both represent the same data. Binary uses 8 digits per byte (01000001), hex uses 2 (41). Hex is more compact and readable for humans while maintaining easy conversion to binary (each hex digit = 4 binary digits).