Document & Markup Converter
About UTF-8 ↔ UTF-16 Converter
The UTF-8 to UTF-16 (BE/LE) Binary Converter converts character strings and text files between 8-bit UTF-8 and 16-bit UTF-16 Big Endian / Little Endian encodings, generating hexadecimal byte arrays, escape sequences (`\uXXXX`), and binary dumps.
How to Use UTF-8 ↔ UTF-16 Converter
Step 1
Paste your text or upload a document.
Step 2
Select conversion target (UTF-8, UTF-16LE, or UTF-16BE).
Step 3
Inspect the side-by-side hex byte comparison.
Step 4
Click "Copy Hex" or download converted binary file.
Practical Use Cases for UTF-8 ↔ UTF-16 Converter
Windows Native API & Java String Interoperability
Convert UTF-8 web strings into UTF-16LE byte buffers required by Windows Win32 API wide-character (`wchar_t`) functions and Java memory representations.
Investigating Unicode Surrogate Pair Encoding
Inspect how emojis and rare historical scripts are encoded as 4 bytes in UTF-8 vs two 16-bit surrogate code units in UTF-16.
Input & Output Examples
Converting "A" to UTF-8 vs UTF-16LE
Text: "A"
UTF-8 Hex: `41` (1 byte) | UTF-16LE Hex: `41 00` (2 bytes) | UTF-16BE Hex: `00 41` (2 bytes)
Key Features & Performance
- ✓Converts between UTF-8, UTF-16LE (Little Endian), and UTF-16BE (Big Endian).
- ✓Calculates exact byte length expansion ratio (UTF-16 vs UTF-8).
- ✓Outputs formatted Hex Byte Arrays, C/C++ string literals (`\uXXXX`), and downloadable binary files.
- ✓100% Client-Side memory execution.
- ✓1-Click Copy hex stream.
Key Terminology & Definitions
Endianness (Byte Order)
The order in which multi-byte binary words are stored in computer memory: Little Endian (least significant byte first) vs Big Endian (most significant byte first).
Surrogate Pair
A pair of 16-bit code units (High Surrogate `0xD800–0xDBFF` and Low Surrogate `0xDC00–0xDFFF`) used in UTF-16 to encode supplementary characters above `U+FFFF`.