Octal converter
Convert text to octal character codes and back.
Octal converter
Paste any text and this tool converts every character to its octal (base-8) code, space-separated — or paste a list of octal codes and convert them back to readable text. It runs both directions from a single input box: pick "Text to octal" to encode or "Octal to text" to decode.
Octal shows up constantly around Unix and Linux systems, most visibly in file permission notation like 755 or 644 for chmod — each digit representing a read/write/execute triplet in base 8. Beyond permissions, octal escape sequences appear in older C-family languages and some file formats, and the number base itself is a staple of computer-science courses teaching how binary groups into human-readable digits (three bits per octal digit, cleanly, unlike the four bits packed into a hex digit).
By default the converter encodes per UTF-16 code unit, matching how JavaScript strings are indexed internally. Turn on "Full Unicode code points" to encode by code point instead, so an emoji or a character outside the Basic Multilingual Plane produces one octal number rather than a surrogate pair — useful when round-tripping text that contains diacritics or emoji and you want the decode to reconstruct it exactly.
Everything runs locally in your browser: nothing you paste is uploaded or logged anywhere. Convert a snippet, a permission string or a full paragraph, then copy the result or send it straight to another tool like the binary or hex converter to compare number bases side by side.