Extract text from Btoa encoded files (B2A)
To convert B2A encoded files to another format, you need The Unarchiver or other Encoded software.
To convert other file formats to the "Binary-to-Text Encoding" file type, you need software like The Unarchiver or a similar tool.
The .B2A file extension represents a Btoa Encoded File, an obsolete format used primarily on legacy Unix systems. The btoa (binary-to-ASCII) utility converted binary data into printable ASCII text. This was historically necessary for transmitting files over networks, email systems, or Usenet newsgroups that could only handle 7-bit text characters and would corrupt raw binary bits. Users can decode these files using the original Unix atob command or modern extraction tools like The Unarchiver. You can read more about binary-to-text encoding on Wikipedia.
This format is practically dead and extremely disadvantageous today. .B2A files are inherently inefficient, taking up significantly more disk space than the raw binary data they contain. Modern email and transfer protocols support native binary transmission, rendering this encoding useless. Furthermore, the format does not contain explicit metadata about what the underlying binary data actually is - once decoded, the file could be an archive, an image, or a legacy executable.
Users must decode .B2A files to extract the original binary content. Target formats depend entirely on the hidden source file but often result in ZIP, TAR, or raw binary files. The extraction process strictly restores the original bits without data loss.
Because .B2A is an archaic text-encoding format, standard online converters fail to process it. They typically do not know how to handle the legacy atob decoding algorithm. If our analysis detects the underlying structure, we can help you extract the data safely.
Convert.Guru analyzes your B2A file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted BA2 files.
If you want to convert B2A file to BASE64, HEX, BIN, ENC, CRYPT, AES, DES, RSA, PGP, GPG, ASC or KEY, you can use The Unarchiver or similar software from the "Binary to ASCII text encoding" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert CER, BIN, PEM, DER, KEY, P7S, PFX, ENC, P12, BASE64, P7B or HEX files to B2A, try The Unarchiver or another comparable tool in the "Binary to ASCII text encoding" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our B2A converter.