Text Encoding Converter

This is a common source of bugs! encodeURI() escapes characters that have special meaning in a full URL (like spaces), but leaves characters like /:&? alone so the URL remains valid. encodeURIComponent() escapes everything that isn't alphanumeric (including /:&?), making it safe to put inside a single query parameter value.

No! Base64 is an encoding scheme, not encryption. It obfuscates data to make it safe for transport (like sending images inside JSON), but it offers zero security. Anyone can decode Base64 back to the original text instantly. Never use it to hide passwords.

Computers read binary (0s and 1s), but that's very long for humans to read. Hexadecimal is a shorthand: one Hex digit represents exactly 4 binary bits (a nibble). Two Hex digits represent one full Byte (8 bits). It's the standard for displaying memory addresses and color codes.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a legacy character set that maps the first 128 characters (English letters, numbers, and basic symbols) to numbers 0-127. While modern apps use Unicode (UTF-8) to support global languages, ASCII remains the foundation of computing text.

URLs can only contain a specific set of safe characters (ASCII). If a URL contains unsafes characters like spaces, emojis, or foreign letters, they must be converted to a % symbol followed by their two-digit Hex code. For example, a space becomes %20.

Converting text to Binary shows you exactly how the computer stores it on the disk. Each letter is converted to its numeric value (ASCII/Unicode) and then to an 8-bit binary string. It's mostly educational for understanding low-level computing.

Base64 creates a 33% overhead. It uses 4 ASCII characters to represent every 3 Bytes of original binary data. This is why sending large images as Base64 strings in API responses is generally discouraged compared to sending them as binary blobs or separate files.

A JSON Web Token (JWT) is just three Base64-encoded JSON parts strung together. Yes, you can use the Base64 decoder part of this tool to read the payload (middle section) of a JWT, but for deeper analysis, use a dedicated JWT debugger.

Hexadecimal can only consist of 0-9 and A-F. If your input string contains 'G', 'Z', or other letters, the decoding will fail or produce garbage data because those are not valid base-16 digits.

Not exactly. UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. The first 128 characters of UTF-8 are identical to ASCII. However, UTF-8 can use up to 4 bytes per character to represent emojis and characters from every language on Earth, whereas ASCII is strictly limited to English characters.