Text to Hexadecimal Converter
Convert text (ASCII/UTF-8) to hexadecimal and back.
Also shows binary, decimal, and octal representations of each character with full code point table.
What Is Hexadecimal? Hexadecimal (hex) is a base-16 number system using digits 0–9 and letters A–F. One hex digit represents exactly 4 bits — so two hex digits perfectly represent one byte (8 bits). This makes hex far more compact and human-readable than binary for representing raw bytes. Programmers routinely use hex for memory addresses, color codes, machine code, and data encoding.
ASCII Character Encoding ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was developed in 1963 in the United States by the American Standards Association. It maps 128 characters (letters, digits, punctuation, control codes) to integers 0–127. Example: ‘A’ = 65 = 0x41, ‘a’ = 97 = 0x61, ‘0’ = 48 = 0x30, space = 32 = 0x20. ASCII fits in 7 bits — the 8th bit was used for parity in early systems.
UTF-8 Encoding UTF-8 is the dominant text encoding on the internet — over 98% of websites use it. For ASCII characters (0–127), UTF-8 is identical to ASCII (single byte). Characters 128–2047 use 2 bytes; 2048–65535 use 3 bytes; higher code points use 4 bytes. This backward compatibility made UTF-8 the natural successor to ASCII. UTF-8 was designed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike in 1992 in the United States.
Common Hex Values Null (NUL): 0x00. Tab: 0x09. Newline: 0x0A. Carriage return: 0x0D. Space: 0x20. Numbers 0–9: 0x30–0x39. Letters A–Z: 0x41–0x5A. a–z: 0x61–0x7A. Delete (DEL): 0x7F — the last ASCII control character.
Applications of Hex in Computing Memory dumps: hex editors display file contents as raw bytes in hex + ASCII preview. Color codes: CSS colors (#FF5733) are RGB values in hex — R=0xFF, G=0x57, B=0x33. MAC addresses: network hardware addresses like AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF are 6 hex bytes. Cryptography: SHA-256 hashes, AES keys, and encrypted data are commonly displayed in hex. Debugging: assembly language, network protocols, and binary file formats are analyzed in hex.
XOR Trick in Hex XOR of two hex strings is done byte-by-byte and is used extensively in cryptography. One-time pad encryption: ciphertext = plaintext XOR key. If ciphertext and key share the same hex value at a position, plaintext = 0x00 (null).
Hex to Text Conversion Each pair of hex digits → one byte → one ASCII character (for standard ASCII range). 0x48 0x65 0x6C 0x6C 0x6F → H e l l o. Non-printable hex values (< 0x20 or = 0x7F) are control characters with no visible glyph.