Inspect exactly how text becomes UTF-8 bytes – as hex, percent-escapes, decimal or hex escapes – and convert those bytes back to text.
Show calculation steps
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How to use the UTF-8 Encoder and Decoder
- Paste text to encode, or UTF-8 bytes to decode.
- Set the direction and the byte format – hex, percent-escapes, decimal or hex escapes.
- Click "Convert" to see exactly which bytes represent your text.
Frequently asked questions
What makes UTF-8 the dominant encoding?
It is backwards compatible with ASCII – every ASCII file is already valid UTF-8 – while still covering all of Unicode using one to four bytes per character. It also has no byte-order ambiguity, unlike UTF-16.
How do I know how many bytes a character will take?
ASCII characters take one byte; most Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic letters take two; most CJK characters and common symbols take three; emoji and rarer scripts take four. The UTF-8 Byte Counter breaks any text down by these categories.
Why does the percent format look like URL encoding?
Because it is the same thing. Percent-encoding of non-ASCII characters is defined as percent-escaping their UTF-8 bytes, so this view shows exactly what a URL encoder produces.
