Flutter & Dart: Convert Strings to Binary

Binary is made up of 0s and 1s, arranged in a sequence, and can be of any length. This quick article will show you how to convert a given string into binary in Dart (and Flutter as well).

The steps:

1. Declare a function named stringToBinary that takes a string parameter and returns a binary representation.
2. Inside the function, create an empty list to store the binary representations of each character.
3. Use a loop to iterate over each character in the input string.
4. Get the ASCII value of the current character using the codeUnitAt() method.
5. Convert the ASCII value to binary using the toRadixString() method with the radix value set to 2.
6. Append the binary representation to the list.
7. After the loop completes, join the binary representations in the list using a space separator.
8. Return the joined binary string.

Code example:

// KindaCode.com
import 'package:flutter/foundation.dart';

String stringToBinary(String input) {
  List<String> binaryList = [];

  for (int i = 0; i < input.length; i++) {
    int charCode = input.codeUnitAt(i);
    String binary = charCode.toRadixString(2);
    binaryList.add(binary);
  }

  return binaryList.join(' ');
}

void main() {
  String input = "KindaCode.com";
  String binaryString = stringToBinary(input);
  debugPrint(binaryString);
}

Output:

1001011 1101001 1101110 1100100 1100001 1000011 1101111 1100100 1100101 101110 1100011 1101111 1101101

That’s it. Further reading:

• Flutter: 2 Ways to Create an Onboarding Flow (Intro Slider)
• Flutter & Dart: Sorting a List of Objects/Maps by Date
• How to Reverse a String in Dart (3 Approaches)
• Working with the Align widget in Flutter
• Flutter: Reading Bytes from a Network Image
• Flutter TextField: Styling labelText, hintText, and errorText

You can also tour around our Flutter topic page or Dart topic page for the most recent tutorials and examples.