Text to Unicode Converter

Convert text to Unicode code points and escapes — and back

This text to Unicode converter shows exactly which characters a piece of text is made of and writes them in the form you need: Unicode code points such as U+1F600, JavaScript and JSON escapes (\uD83D\uDE00, with the surrogate pair worked out for you), ES6-style \u{1F600}, Python’s \U0001F600, \xHH UTF-8 bytes, HTML entities, CSS escapes, or raw UTF-8 and UTF-16 values. Switch to “Unicode → Text” and it reads any of those forms back — even a mixture of them in one string.

Underneath, a character inspector lists every code point with its name or category, its Unicode block and script, and its UTF-8, UTF-16 and HTML forms. A normalization panel compares NFC, NFD, NFKC and NFKD, and a checker flags hidden characters — zero-width spaces, direction overrides, byte-order marks — and look-alike letters such as a Cyrillic “а” posing as a Latin “a”.

Developers debugging encodings, translators checking accents, security teams looking for spoofed names and students learning how text is stored will all find what they need here. Everything runs in your browser.

How to use the Text to Unicode Converter

1. Choose “Text → Unicode” and type or paste text. The encoded form appears on the right as you type.
2. Pick a format. For U+ lists, bytes and decimal values choose a separator; for escape formats you can escape only non-ASCII characters and keep plain letters readable.
3. To decode, choose “Unicode → Text”, paste escapes, entities, code points or hex bytes, and leave “Auto-detect” on or pick the exact format.
4. Check the warnings list and the character inspector to see names, blocks, scripts and byte values for each character.
5. Copy the result, or press “Swap direction” to send it back through the other way and confirm the round trip.

Text to Unicode Converter features

The same emoji in every format

😀 is a single character, code point U+1F600. Here is how each format writes it:

Code points, UTF-8 and UTF-16 in brief

Unicode gives every character a number, its code point, from U+0000 to U+10FFFF. Encodings decide how that number is stored. UTF-8 uses one byte for ASCII, two for most European and Middle Eastern letters, three for Indian scripts, Chinese and the ₹ sign, and four for emoji. UTF-16 uses one 16-bit unit up to U+FFFF and a pair of “surrogates” (D800–DBFF followed by DC00–DFFF) above that, which is why JavaScript reports "😀".length as 2.

Several code points can make one visible character: 👨‍👩‍👧 is three emoji joined by two zero-width joiners, and नमस्ते is six code points. The inspector lists code points, not visible characters, so you can see every piece.

Normalization forms

NFC is the form the W3C recommends for the web and the safest choice for storing and comparing text. The K forms also fold compatibility characters such as ligatures, circled digits and full-width letters into plain ones, which helps search but loses formatting. Copy a normalized form from the panel, or clean pasted text further with the Text Cleaner.

Hidden and look-alike characters

A username, domain or password can contain characters that look identical to ordinary ones: Cyrillic “а” (U+0430) beside Latin “a”, a zero-width space inside a word, or a right-to-left override that makes code display in a different order from how it runs. The checker names each one and says why it matters. To insert an invisible character on purpose, use the Invisible Character tool; for byte-level binary or hex, see Text to Binary, and for escaping whole strings, the JSON Escape and HTML Entity Encoder tools.