Morse Code Converter

Morse code is one of the oldest digital communication systems still in use — it predates the telephone and was the first method of sending text over long distances electrically. Developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in the 1830s, it encodes letters, digits, and punctuation as sequences of two signals: a short signal (the dot, written as .) and a long signal (the dash, written as -). The genius of Morse code is that it assigns shorter codes to more frequent letters — E, the most common letter in English, is a single dot (.); T is a single dash (-); while less common letters like Q (--.-) and Z (--..) take four signals. This variable-length encoding, optimized for English letter frequencies, makes Morse transmissions more efficient than a fixed-length code would be.\n\nThis tool uses the International Morse Code standard (also called Continental Morse), which is the version adopted worldwide for radio, aviation (until recently), and maritime communication. The United States originally used a different variant (American Morse, or Railroad Morse) with slightly different codes and a third signal length, but International Morse is the universal standard today and is what this tool implements. The full mapping covers A-Z, 0-9, and the most commonly transmitted punctuation marks: period, comma, question mark, slash, apostrophe, exclamation mark, at sign, hyphen, parentheses, ampersand, colon, semicolon, equals sign, plus sign, underscore, quotation marks, and dollar sign. Characters that have no standard Morse representation (non-Latin scripts, emoji, accented letters) are skipped with a visible placeholder in the output.\n\nOn the encode side, text is converted character by character. Letters and digits are looked up in a mapping table, then each Morse code is appended with a space between characters and a forward slash (/) between words to make the output unambiguous — without a word separator, it would be impossible to know where one word ends and the next begins, since the space between characters and the space between words would look identical. On the decode side, the tool splits the input on spaces, matches each token against the defined Morse sequences, replaces slashes with word spaces, and rebuilds the text. Unknown sequences produce a question mark with a warning count shown.\n\nMorse code remains actively used today by amateur (ham) radio operators worldwide, in assistive technology for people with limited mobility, and in aviation navigation aids where VOR identifiers broadcast their three-letter code in Morse. It is also a popular puzzle element in escape rooms, geocaching, and ARG (alternate reality game) challenges. This tool makes it trivial to work with Morse code for any of these purposes, without needing to memorise the full mapping.