Morse Code Translator

Encoding and decoding

This uses International Morse code as defined in ITU-R M.1677-1 — the 26 letters, the digits, and the standard punctuation. Paste either text or Morse and the direction is detected automatically; a string made only of dots, dashes, slashes and spaces is treated as Morse.

Why round-tripping changes case

Morse has no concept of upper and lower case, so decoding always produces capitals. Encoding "Hello" and decoding the result gives "HELLO" — the information is genuinely not in the signal, so that is correct rather than a bug.

Spacing conventions

• A single space separates letters
• Three spaces separate words — the form that survives copy-paste intact
• A / is also accepted as a word separator when decoding, though it is never produced, since a stray slash in pasted text is more often punctuation

Unicode dashes and middots that phone keyboards insert are normalised automatically, so pasted Morse from a chat app usually just works.

Audio playback

Playback follows standard timing: a dash is three dot-lengths, the gap between letters is three, and between words seven. Speed is set in words per minute against the PARIS standard, where 15 wpm is a common practice pace. The tone is generated with the Web Audio API — nothing is downloaded.

Characters without an equivalent

Symbols with no Morse representation are dropped rather than guessed at, and the tool lists exactly which ones so you can decide whether to rewrite them. When decoding, any sequence that is not valid Morse appears as ?.