Binary Data

Binary data is just information that isn’t plain text—like images, files, or subtitles. Make.com sometimes stores this data in a coded way that computers understand but looks unreadable to us.

Computers store all data in binary, which is a bunch of 0s and 1s 😋

Let’s take my name Max van Collenburg as an example:

01001101 01100001 01111000 00100000 01110110 01100001 01101110 00100000 
01000011 01101111 01101100 01101100 01100101 01101110 01100010 01110101 01110010 01100111

But to make it easier to work with, this data is often displayed in hexadecimal, which is a combination of letters and numbers:

4D 61 78 20 76 61 6E 20 43 6F 6C 6C 65 6E 62 75 72 67

This is what you will most often see when working with binary data in your Make.com scenario.

Here is an example of how you can recognize binary data in Make.com after running a scenario:

See? A bunch of hexadecimal.

Convert binary data to a text

Sometimes, binary data is actually a file that contains text, like a subtitle or document. In such cases, you may need to convert it back into readable text (also called a string) so you can use it in your scenario.

For that, you can use the text function toString().

Here is a simple example of where we have data that contains the binary 01001101 01100001 01111000.

toString(1.Data)

= Max

It’s important to map the data variable, and not just type the binary code in the toString() function.

Let me give you a real world example.

Example

I wanted to download the captions of a YouTube video so that I can use OpenAI to repurpose the content.

But after I downloaded the captions, I got this:

Here, under Data you can see a short sample of the binary data, the full binary data is thousands upon thousands of lines long.

In this case, it is a caption file, which I know has regular text.

So in the next module, I can use the toString() function to turn all of this binary data into a text that we can then use for something.

And as you can see, we can now read the text because the successfully converted the hexadecimal to a string:

Just keep in mind that this only works for text documents, and not for something like images or videos 🤗