Hex to ASCII Converter

Converting Hexadecimal to ASCII

Hexadecimal is a base 16 numbering system, in which each digit of a number are represented by 16 possible characters. These chracters are 0-9 and A-F. Hexadecimal is widely used when representing binary numbers, as they can perfectly represent a byte using only two digits.

Computers need a way to represent text. A computer's representation of text is called an encoding. The simplest encoding is ASCII, in which it represents each character as a byte (8 digit binary number), and thus can encode up to 127 (255 in its extended form) different characters.

This makes hexadecimal a perfect representation of ASCII text, as the encoding calls for a single byte to be delegated for each character. By using a simple table, you can use hexadecimal to represent any ASCII character.

However, ASCII does not cover Unicode characters, which include emojis and other non-latin characters. UTF-8 was created for this reason, and is the most common encoding type used today, supporting over one million Unicode code points. UTF-8 is used by the converter here to convert binary to Unicode. Unfortunately, its encoding and decoding process is complex enough that it cannot be covered here, so we'll stick to the basic 127 ASCII characters.

Converting hexadecimal to ASCII:

1. Each ASCII character is represented by one byte, so pad the hexadecimal string with zeroes so its length is a multiple of two.
2. Split the hexadecimal string into chunks, with each chunk being two digits long and thus one byte.
3. Working left to right, get the value of each hexadecimal byte using an ASCII table.
4. Get the completed message.

Example

Converting 636f646516 to ASCII:

1. The hexadecimal string is already the correct length.
2. Split the string into byte chunks.
   • 6316 6f16 6416 6516
3. Working left to right, decode using the table.
   • code

ASCII Table