CIPHERNAUT
csen
Cipher catalogue
EncodingDifficulty: Medium

Binary code

Text written with only zeros and ones, the way a computer sees it. Choose 8, 7 or 5 bits.

Try it

27 characters

Result · Binary code

01010011 01100101 01100011 01110010 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01100101 01110011 01110011 01100001 01100111 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100011 01101100 01110101 01100010

How it works

  1. 1Every character has a number inside a computer, for example A is 65. Write that number in binary, using only 0 and 1.
  2. 2With 8 bits each character becomes a group of eight digits: A is 01000001. One group is one byte.
  3. 3Accents take more than one byte: the letter č is two groups, 11000100 10001101.
  4. 4The 5-bit puzzle version is simpler: A is 00001, B is 00010 … Z is 11010, which is just the letter's place in the alphabet.
  5. 5To decode, turn each group back into a number (left to right: 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1) and look up the character.

Example

HELLO

01001000 01000101 01001100 01001100 01001111

Did you know

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz described the binary number system in 1703. The ASCII character code was first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association (now ANSI); it uses 7 bits for 128 characters, with no accents. UTF-8, which covers nearly every language, was sketched in September 1992 by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike while working on the Plan 9 operating system. Today it is the most widely used text encoding on the web.

Try to decode

This message is encrypted with Binary code using the default settings:

01011010 01000101 01010010 01001111 00100000 01000001 01001110 01000100 00100000 01001111 01001110 01000101

Hint

It uses 8 bits, groups are separated by spaces. The letter A is 01000001.

Show solution

ZERO AND ONE

More ciphers in this category