Text.FromBinary

Text

Decodes a binary value into text using the specified encoding.

Syntax

Text.FromBinary(binary as binary, optional encoding as nullable number) as text

Parameters

Name	Type	Required	Description
`binary`	`binary`	Yes	The binary value to decode.
`encoding`	`number`	No	A TextEncoding value specifying the character encoding. Defaults to TextEncoding.Utf8 (65001). Common values: TextEncoding.Ascii (20127), TextEncoding.Unicode (1200), TextEncoding.Utf16 (1200), TextEncoding.Utf8 (65001).

Return Value

text — A text value decoded from the binary data.

Remarks

Text.FromBinary decodes a binary value into a text string using the specified character encoding. This is the inverse of Text.ToBinary. If no encoding is specified, TextEncoding.Utf8 (65001) is used by default, which is correct for most modern data sources.

The encoding parameter accepts values from the TextEncoding enum: - TextEncoding.Utf8 (65001) — default; correct for most APIs and modern files - TextEncoding.Ascii (20127) — 7-bit ASCII only; safe for codes and identifiers - TextEncoding.Unicode / TextEncoding.Utf16 (1200) — little-endian UTF-16 - TextEncoding.Utf16BE (1201) — big-endian UTF-16 - TextEncoding.Utf32 (12000) - TextEncoding.Windows (1252) — legacy Windows Western European encoding

Always specify the encoding explicitly when working with binary data from legacy systems or files that may not be UTF-8. Using the wrong encoding will produce garbled output without raising an error, because the bytes are valid but misinterpreted. If you receive binary from a REST API, UTF-8 is almost always correct. For older CSV or text files from Windows systems, TextEncoding.Windows (1252) may be needed.

Text.FromBinary is commonly used after Binary.FromText decodes a base64 payload, or when reading raw binary file content that needs to be treated as text before parsing.

Examples

Example 1: Decode a base64 payload from a web API response

Text.FromBinary(Binary.FromText("SGVsbG8gV29ybGQ=", BinaryEncoding.Base64))

Result

	Result
1	Hello World

Example 2: Round-trip encode and decode with explicit encoding

let
    original = "Alice Smith",
    encoded = Text.ToBinary(original, TextEncoding.Utf8),
    decoded = Text.FromBinary(encoded, TextEncoding.Utf8)
in
    decoded

Applied Steps

The final output — decodes the UTF-8 binary back to text using Text.FromBinary with the same encoding, recovering the original string exactly.

	Result
1	Alice Smith

Example 3: Decode a Windows-1252 encoded binary file

Text.FromBinary(
    Text.ToBinary("Ren\u00e9e Dupont", TextEncoding.Windows),
    TextEncoding.Windows
)