Text to Morse & Binary Converter

Whether you are decoding a puzzle, teaching a class about how computers store letters, or just having fun with secret messages, translating between plain text and Morse code or binary is oddly satisfying. This converter does both, in both directions, updating the moment you type.

Switch between two modes — Text ↔ Morse and Text ↔ Binary — and edit either side: type a sentence and watch the dots-and-dashes or the 1s-and-0s appear, or paste a coded string and read the decoded text back. Morse uses the international standard, with letters separated by spaces and words by a forward slash; binary encodes each character as its eight-bit code. Hobbyists, students, escape-room designers, and curious tinkerers all use it to encode and decode without memorizing a chart.

If you paste something the mode cannot parse — a stray character in a Morse string or a digit other than 0 or 1 in binary — the field turns red and explains the rule, so you can spot the problem instead of getting silent garbage.

Morse conversion uses a character map built from the standard International Morse alphabet, with a reverse map derived from it for decoding. Letters within a word are separated by a space and words by a forward slash, which is the conventional way of writing Morse as text since the real distinction is a timing gap rather than a character.

That separator convention is what makes written Morse ambiguous without it. The sequence for a letter is not self-delimiting, so a run of dots and dashes with no gaps has many possible readings — which is why the spacing is not optional decoration.

Binary conversion maps each character to its numeric code point in base two. Unlike Morse it is a fixed-width encoding per byte, so it needs no separators in principle, though grouping into bytes makes it readable.

Real Morse is defined by relative durations rather than by symbols. A dash is three times the length of a dot, the gap between symbols within a letter is one dot, between letters three, and between words seven. Written dots and dashes are a transcription of that timing, which is why hearing Morse and reading it are quite different skills — and why transmission speed is quoted in words per minute rather than characters.

The standard alphabet covers the 26 Latin letters, ten digits, and a limited set of punctuation. Accented characters, most symbols, and anything outside that set have no standard representation, so a conversion will simply drop them. Prosigns — procedural signals for start of message, end of transmission, and error — are transmitted as run-together letters and are part of operating practice rather than the alphabet.

Morse remains genuinely useful because it degrades gracefully. A signal too weak or noisy for voice can still be read as tone, which is why it persisted in maritime and aviation use long after voice radio, and why amateur operators still use it for long-distance contacts at very low power.