Hex to Text / ASCII Converter

Two hex digits at a time, converted to characters

'48 69 21' (3 bytes) decodes to 'Hi!' -- 48 hex is decimal 72 ('H'), 69 hex is decimal 105 ('i'), and 21 hex is decimal 33 ('!'), each pair of hex digits representing exactly one byte.

Hex is a natural fit for representing byte values because exactly two hex digits map to exactly one byte (8 bits) -- this clean correspondence is why hex dumps of binary data are a common way to display raw bytes in a compact, readable format across many programming and networking contexts.

The spaces between hex pairs in this example are for readability -- the underlying decode logic groups the hex string into 2-character chunks regardless of whether separating spaces are present in the input.

What happens with unexpected characters in the input

Non-hex characters are ignored on decode. Output is UTF-16 code units 0-255. If the input contains a character that isn't a valid hex digit (0-9, A-F), that character is skipped rather than causing an error or being included literally in the decoded output -- useful for pasting hex that includes stray formatting characters, but worth being aware of since it means malformed input won't necessarily be flagged.

The output represents UTF-16 code units in the 0-255 range, which covers standard ASCII and Latin-1 characters correctly, but hex values representing characters outside that range (which would need more than 2 hex digits per character in a full Unicode encoding) aren't handled by this simple 2-hex-digit-per-byte model.

This is functionally similar to the binary-to-text conversion, just using a more compact base -- both decode raw byte values into their corresponding ASCII characters, differing only in whether the byte values are written as 8 binary digits or 2 hex digits.

Related byte and encoding tools

For the same concept using binary digits instead of hex, the Binary to Text/ASCII Converter handles that related base.

For working with hex, binary, and decimal representations of a general numeric value rather than decoding text, the Binary/Decimal/Hex Converter is the broader tool.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)