Text to Morse Converter

A text to Morse converter rewrites each letter, digit, and punctuation mark as a sequence of short and long signals, dots and dashes. The International Morse Code used here is the one the International Telecommunication Union defines in Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1: the 26 Latin letters, the digits 0 to 9, the accented É, and a fixed set of punctuation made up of the full stop, comma, colon, question mark, apostrophe, hyphen, slash, both parentheses, quotation marks, the double hyphen (=), the cross (+), and the at sign.

On the air, Morse is defined by timing rather than symbols. ITU-R M.1677-1 sets a dash at three dots long, a one-dot gap between the signals of a letter, a three-dot gap between letters, and a seven-dot gap between words. Written Morse has to show those gaps with characters, which is the job of the separators: a single space between letters and a slash between words by default, with a pipe, a double space, or a triple space as alternatives. The dot can be drawn as a period, a centered dot, or an asterisk, and the dash as a hyphen, an underscore, or an equals sign. A letter separator identical to the word separator makes word breaks unrecoverable, and the converter says so beside the result.

Encoding ignores case, since Morse has no lowercase. Four signs outside the ITU set are included because they are in wide use: the exclamation mark (-.-.--), semicolon (-.-.-.), ampersand (.-...), and underscore (..--.-). Typographic apostrophes and quotation marks and the en dash, the forms the ITU table itself prints, encode to the same signals as the plain apostrophe, quotation mark, and hyphen. Any other character, including accented letters other than É, has no code; it is left out of the output and listed beside the result instead of vanishing silently. Procedural signals such as SOS are keyed as one unbroken run (...---...), but text is encoded letter by letter, so SOS comes out as ... --- ... with the letter gaps.

Decoding reads the separators back. A slash or a run of three or more spaces always marks a word break; a pipe marks a word break as well, unless the pipe is the chosen letter separator, in which case it divides letters. One or two spaces divide letters. The dot and dash symbols in Settings are mapped back to dots and dashes, and plain periods and hyphens are always understood. A sequence that is not in the code table decodes as a question mark and is listed, so a real question mark (..--..) can be told apart from a misread one. Only International Morse is decoded; American railroad Morse used different codes and spacing and does not decode correctly here.

HELLO WORLD encodes as .... . .-.. .-.. --- / .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. with the default separators. In dot units, H takes 7 (four dots and three one-unit gaps), E takes 1, each L takes 9, and O takes 11, so the five letters need 37 units plus four three-unit letter gaps, 49 units for the word HELLO. Speed is set against the standard word PARIS, which is exactly 50 units including its word gap, so the dot length in milliseconds is 1200 divided by the words per minute: 60 ms at 20 words per minute, which puts HELLO at about 2.9 seconds.

Morse Code remains relevant across amateur radio, aviation, maritime communication, accessibility technology, and education. Converting between text and Morse sequences serves practical and instructional purposes in many fields.

• Amateur Radio: Call signs, signal reports, and short messages for CW (continuous wave) operation can be written out in standard notation for practice, and received copy can be checked by decoding it back to text for the log.
• Education: Study sheets for the International Morse alphabet and decoding exercises built from vocabulary words come straight from the encoder. The unit timing in the worked example also shows why E and T, the most common letters in English, carry the shortest codes.
• Emergency Preparedness: Short distress and status messages can be prepared for situations where voice communication is unavailable, alongside practice recognizing the SOS pattern (...---...) and other standard sequences.
• Accessibility: Some assistive input systems accept Morse from one or two switches, mapping dot and dash sequences to letters for people with limited motor control. Encoded vocabulary lists serve as practice material for those systems.
• Puzzle Design: Morse clues for escape rooms, scavenger hunts, geocaches, and classroom games can use a themed symbol set, such as asterisks and equals signs, and still decode correctly.
• Historical Research: Transcripts of International Morse traffic from ship logs, radio intercepts, and wartime records decode directly once their separators are normalized. American railroad telegraph records used a different code and need a different key.
• Signal Verification: Sequences produced by hardware keyers, training apps, or software libraries can be cross-checked against the ITU table, which catches a wrong punctuation code or a missing letter gap.
• Creative Projects: Names, dates, and phrases encoded for jewelry engraving, prints, or tattoo designs often read more cleanly with a centered dot and an underscore than with a period and a hyphen.