String to Binary Converter

Binary is the ARG cliché that never dies - the clue that looks like 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 and turns out to spell "Hello" - and there's a reason it never dies: it's the one format almost every puzzle-solver recognizes and almost no one can read fluently. This node produces exactly that. Feed it text, get back space-separated 8-bit binary, one byte per character.

It's the pack's most basic converter, which makes it the most flexible. Binary is the universal substrate - you can XOR it, flip bits, hide it in images, or feed it to a beginner puzzle that just needs the "decode the binary" step. If you're building a puzzle chain, this is often the first link.

How it works

• text - the string to convert.
• encoding_format - the text encoding for the byte conversion: utf-8, utf-16, utf-32, ascii, latin-1, cp1252, utf-8-sig, or Other (with other_encoding_format for custom Python codecs).

Output: converted_txt, binary with each byte written as 8 bits, space-separated.

The encoding choice changes the byte count: "Hi" in ascii is 2 bytes (01001000 01101001), but in utf-16 it's 4 bytes because every character takes two bytes. For the classic "binary puzzle" look, use ascii or utf-8 - anything multi-byte produces a longer, less recognizable string.

The input that matters

text and the choice between ascii and utf-8 are the only two decisions you'll make. The "Other" escape hatch exists for exotic encodings, and honestly it exists for puzzle-makers being clever - which is allowed.

Where it fits

Convert a message to binary, then hand the binary to a solver who converts it back - the pack's Binary2String sibling is the round-trip partner. For image-based puzzles, binary pairs naturally with the LSB steganography nodes: hide binary text in the least significant bits of a generated image. If your puzzle needs 01 strings without spaces instead, the output just drops the spaces trivially.

Installing it

Part of ComfyUI ARG Toolkit - ComfyUI Manager (search "ComfyUI ARG Toolkit") or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/AzelusLightvale/ComfyUI-ARG-Toolkit

Restart ComfyUI. No model files or heavy deps.

Common issues

• Longer than expected output - you picked utf-16/utf-32; each character takes 2 or 4 bytes. Switch to ascii/utf-8 for the standard 8-bits-per-character look.
• Mismatched decode - you must decode with the same encoding you encoded with; decoding utf-16 binary as ascii gives mojibake.
• It's not binary numbers - this is per-byte text encoding. If a puzzle wants a number in binary (101101 for 45), this is the wrong tool; use a number-to-binary node instead.