Hex to Text Converter

You can paste hex straight from a log, a debugger or a packet capture, because the tool cleans the input before it decodes.

1. Paste or type into the Input box.
2. Leave Mode on Auto detect, or choose Text to code or Code to text to force a direction.
3. For hex output, tick or untick Space between bytes. On gives 48 69, off gives 4869.
4. Read the result. Hex digits are written in capitals.
5. Press Copy, Download .txt or Use as input to take the result further.

Before decoding, the tool removes 0x prefixes and any spaces, commas, colons, semicolons or hyphens, so 48 69, 4869, 0x48,0x69 and 48:69 all read as the same two bytes. Auto detect treats the input as hex only when what remains is hex digits, an even number of them, and at least two.

Hexadecimal is base 16, using 0 to 9 and then A to F for ten to fifteen. One hex digit is exactly four bits, so a byte is always two digits. Work one out by hand: 48 is 4 x 16 + 8 = 72, the letter H. That is why 48 65 6C 6C 6F reads as Hello. Decoded bytes are interpreted as UTF-8, so C3 A9 returns é rather than two stray symbols.

Any byte from 80 upwards belongs to a multi-byte UTF-8 sequence and cannot stand alone as a character.

Ordinary words made only of the letters A to F, such as face, dead or cafe, also look like hex, so Auto detect decodes them into two bytes and you may see replacement characters. Set Mode to Text to code when you want to encode a word like that.

• Odd digit counts. In Code to text mode a stray final digit is dropped, so 486 gives H. Count your digits.
• Wrong encoding. The decoder reads UTF-8 only. A lone E9 from a Latin-1 file shows as a replacement character, not é.
• Colours and numbers. A web colour such as #48656C is three channel values, not text, so open it in the colour picker. A hex number such as FF belongs in the number base converter.

Backslash escapes need care. Pasting \x48\x69 with Mode on Auto detect gets encoded as text, because the backslashes and x characters are not hex. Set Mode to Code to text and the non-hex characters are skipped, giving Hi. The same applies to a dump that includes offset columns: the offsets are decoded as bytes too, so remove them first.

It takes pasted text, not files, and does not show a dump with offsets or an ASCII column beside the bytes. Output is shown in one block, so for very long dumps copy it into an editor.

Hex is the usual way to show raw bytes to people. Packet captures and serial logs print payloads as hex, firmware tools list configuration bytes, and HTML, CSS and JavaScript use hex codes in character escapes. Security work reads file headers and memory in the same notation. Puzzles and capture-the-flag challenges often hide a clue as a run of hex pairs. To see the same bytes as ones and zeros use the binary translator, and for a compact text form of bytes see the Base64 encoder.

Worked example in the other direction: encoding Hello gives 48 65 6C 6C 6F with spaces and 48656C6C6F without. Encoding 4869 as text gives 34 38 36 39, because the characters 4, 8, 6 and 9 are themselves bytes. That is the difference between hex that represents text and text that happens to look like hex, and it is why the Mode setting exists.