UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding that converts Unicode code points into one or more bytes. It is the dominant text encoding on the web today. 🌐🧠 This free online tool lets you convert between human-readable text and its UTF-8 byte/escape representations for inspection, debugging, and learning.

What you can do

• Encode text into UTF-8 byte sequences or Unicode escape entities.
• Decode UTF-8 bytes or escape sequences back into readable text.
• Inspect how ASCII, emojis, and international characters are actually stored.
• Swap & copy results quickly while experimenting.

How it works

• Encode offers two output Formats:
  • Entities (default): Unicode escapes like \u0048. Characters outside the BMP use surrogate pairs (e.g. 😀 → \uD83D\uDE00).
  • Numbers: Raw UTF-8 bytes shown as uppercase hexadecimal, space-separated (e.g. 48 65 6C 6C 6F).
• Decode reverses the process:
  • From Entities: recognizes \uXXXX, \u{...}, and \UXXXXXXXX
  • From Numbers: parses UTF-8 hex bytes (spaces, comas, continuous hex, optional 0x prefixes)

UTF-8 quick reference

Buttons

• Encode »: Encode the left input using the selected format and display it on the right.
• Decode »: Decode the left textarea according to the selected format.
• « Swap »: Swap the 2t text areas, the input and the output to continue converting back and forth.
• Copy Result 📋: Copy the output on the right to your clipboard.

Examples

• A → Entities: \u0041 • Numbers: 41
• 😀 → Entities: \uD83D\uDE00 • Numbers: F0 9F 98 80
• Hello → Numbers: 48 65 6C 6C 6F

Tips & notes

• UTF-8 uses 1 - 4 bytes per character depending on the code point.
• ASCII characters (0 - 127) map directly to single UTF-8 bytes.
• Surrogate pairs appear only in UTF-16 escapes, not in raw UTF-8 bytes.
• Uppercase hex is used here for readability and consistency.

Learn more

• UTF-8 (Wikipedia)
• Unicode Wiki
• UTF-8 on MDN Web Docs