ASCII & Unicode Converter
Inspect the code points behind any string, or rebuild text from codes. Works on full Unicode, so emoji and astral-plane characters convert correctly.
Text → codes
72 101 108 108 111
Codes → text
Output appears here
What a code point is
Every character in Unicode has a number, written in the form U+0041 for the letter A. That number is the character's identity and never changes. How it gets stored as bytes is a separate decision, which is where encodings come in.
Why the byte view differs
UTF-8 stores a code point in one to four bytes, using one byte for plain ASCII and more for everything else. This is why an English string and a Japanese string of the same visible length occupy very different amounts of storage, and why byte-based length limits behave unintuitively for non-English text.
When you actually need this
Reach for the code point when you are writing a CSS `content` value, an HTML entity, a programming escape sequence, or a regular expression matching a specific character. Reach for the byte view when debugging text that arrived corrupted — mismatched encoding is the usual cause, and comparing the bytes tells you which encoding was assumed.
Reading an unfamiliar code point
The block a code point falls in tells you a lot before you look anything up. Values below U+0080 are plain ASCII. The U+0300 range is combining marks, which explains stray accents appearing over the wrong letter. Anything above U+1F300 is generally emoji. When debugging corrupted text, that rough map is often enough to identify what went wrong without consulting the full charts.