Online Binary File Viewer

Free Binary File Viewer for Hex and ASCII Data

This online binary file viewer opens any file on your computer and shows exactly what it contains, byte by byte. You don’t need to install a hex editor or know the file’s format. Open a file and you immediately get a hex dump with offsets, hexadecimal bytes and ASCII text side by side.

Beyond the basic dump, you can switch to a bit-by-bit binary view, list readable strings, search for text or byte patterns, jump to any offset, inspect a single byte as several number types, check the file’s signature, see byte statistics, and compare two files. Everything happens in your browser.

What Is a Binary File?

Every file is a sequence of bytes, and each byte is a number from 0 to 255. A “binary file” is any file whose bytes are meant to be read by a program rather than a person: images, executables, archives, databases, firmware and countless application data files.

Binary Files vs Text Files

In a text file, almost every byte is a character code, so a text editor can show it as words. In a binary file, bytes can mean anything: part of a number, a pixel colour, a compressed block or a machine instruction. Opened in a text editor, they look like garbage. A binary file viewer shows the raw values instead, so nothing is hidden or mangled.

Why Binary Data Is Shown as Hexadecimal

One byte is eight bits, which is awkward to read as 01001000. Hexadecimal (base 16) writes the same byte in exactly two characters, 48, because each hex digit covers four bits. Hex is compact, lines up neatly in columns, and converts easily to and from binary, which is why nearly every hex viewer uses it.

How to View a Binary File Online

1. Select or Drop Your File

Drag a file onto the viewer, or press Open file. Any file type is accepted, up to 64 MB, because the whole file is held in your browser’s memory. To try the tool first, press Load example for a small synthetic file made for this page.

2. Choose a View Mode

Hex shows offsets, hex bytes and ASCII, with 8, 16 or 32 bytes per row. ASCII shows 64 characters per row, with dots for bytes that aren’t printable. Binary shows each byte as eight bits. Strings lists readable text runs, and File info shows the signature and statistics.

3. Inspect Bytes and Offsets

Click any byte, or focus the viewer and use the arrow keys, to open the byte inspector. Type an offset such as 0x1000 or 4096 into Go to offset to jump straight there. The status bar always shows the selected offset and the range of bytes on screen.

4. Search or Export the Data

Search for text or hex bytes and step through the highlighted matches. Use Export to copy the visible rows or download a hex dump, the strings list, or a JSON report of the file’s details and statistics.

Binary File Viewer Features

Hexadecimal and ASCII View

The classic hex dump layout, with the offset on the left, hex bytes in the middle (split into groups of eight) and ASCII on the right. Zero bytes and non-printable characters are dimmed so the structure stands out. Only the rows on screen are drawn, so even a 64 MB file scrolls smoothly.

Binary Bit View

Shows every byte as eight 0s and 1s, eight bytes per row. It’s useful for flags, bit fields and learning how bytes are built.

Search Hex and Text

Text search can ignore case; hex search accepts 48 65 6C, 48656C or 0x48 0x65. The first 10,000 matches are counted and highlighted, and the current match is marked more strongly.

File Signature Detection

The viewer checks the file’s first bytes against about 30 known signatures, including images, documents, archives, executables, audio, video, databases and disc images. It reports the detected type and the exact signature bytes, and never guesses from the filename.

Byte Inspector

For the selected byte: offset, hex, decimal, octal, binary and what the ASCII value means (such as NUL or LF). It also reads the bytes starting there as 8, 16, 32 and 64-bit integers and as 32 and 64-bit floating-point numbers, in little- or big-endian order. These are possible readings, not facts about the format.

Binary File Statistics

Printable and zero-byte percentages, the number of distinct byte values, Shannon entropy, the most frequent bytes, and a chart of all 256 byte values. Files up to 8 MB are analysed automatically; for larger files, press Calculate statistics.

Binary File Comparison

Load two files to see whether they’re identical, how many bytes differ and what percentage that is, plus the first and last difference. Differing bytes are shown side by side in context, with buttons to jump to the next or previous difference.

What Can You Use a Binary File Viewer For?

Inspecting BIN and DAT Files

Extensions like .bin and .dat say almost nothing about a file. A quick look at the first bytes and the strings often shows which program made it, or whether it’s really a ZIP, image or database with an unhelpful name.

Finding File Signatures and Magic Bytes

If a file won’t open, check whether it starts with the signature its extension promises. A “.jpg” that begins with 25 50 44 46 is actually a PDF.

Debugging Binary Data

Check that your program wrote the bytes you expected: headers, lengths, byte order and padding. Comparing an expected output with an actual one pinpoints the first byte that went wrong.

Inspecting Firmware and ROM Files

Firmware images and ROM dumps often contain version strings, build dates, copyright notices and embedded file signatures. Strings view and search find them quickly, and Compare shows exactly what changed between two versions.

Finding Readable Strings

Strings view lists every run of printable characters of a chosen minimum length, with its offset. Error messages, paths and settings buried in a binary become easy to read, and you can export them as a text file.

Learning How Binary Data Works

Seeing the same byte as hex, binary, ASCII and integers makes number systems and byte order concrete. Medical images are a good example of structured binary data; our DICOM viewer decodes them into pictures, while this tool shows the raw bytes underneath.

What Is a Hex Dump?

A hex dump is a text listing of a file’s bytes. Here are the first two lines of the example file:

00000000  53 69 6D 70 6C 65 54 6F  6F 6C 73 32 34 00 01 02  |SimpleTools24...|
00000010  48 65 6C 6C 6F 20 42 69  6E 61 72 79 00 FF FE FD  |Hello Binary....|

• Offset (left): the position of the line’s first byte, in hex. 00000010 is byte 16.
• Hexadecimal bytes (middle): 16 bytes per line, split into two groups of eight for easier counting.
• ASCII (right): the same bytes as characters. 48 is “H”.
• Non-printable bytes, such as 00 or FF, appear as dots, because they have no visible character.

Byte offsets are what you’ll see in file-format specifications, crash logs and debugger output, so being able to jump to one is often the fastest way to the data you need.

What Are Magic Bytes?

Many file formats start with a fixed byte sequence that identifies them, called a file signature or magic bytes. Programs use them to check that a file really is the format they expect.

Signatures are specific to each format, and many formats, including plain text, raw data and many proprietary files, have none at all. Some signatures are shared: a ZIP signature also appears at the start of Word, Excel and Android packages, because those are ZIP files inside. So detection can say “this looks like ZIP data”, but it can’t guarantee what a file is.

Is an Online Binary File Viewer Safe?

This binary file viewer online works entirely in your browser. Your file is read from your device with the browser’s File API, and searches, statistics and comparisons run in a Web Worker, which is also on your device. File contents are never uploaded, stored or sent to analytics. Our automated tests check the network while files are opened, searched and exported. Loading the page itself only downloads the tool’s own code.

Viewing is also inert: the viewer never runs a file, and text found inside it is displayed as plain text, never as web content. That said, looking at a file doesn’t make it safe. This isn’t a virus scanner, and statistics like entropy can’t tell you whether a file is malicious.

Common Binary File Extensions

An extension is only a naming convention. Anyone can rename a file, and the same extension can mean different things to different programs. Note that a .hex file is usually text describing bytes, not raw binary. To learn what a file really is, check its bytes, as the File info tab does.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Developer Tools

Working with identifiers? The UUID decoder breaks a 128-bit UUID into its version, variant and timestamp fields. For medical images, the online DICOM viewer displays scans from DICOM files.