Hex ↔ ASCII Converter

Hex is how bytes get written down when they have to survive a document, a report or a chat window. Two hex digits per byte, and the only real question is what separates them — which varies by whichever tool produced the dump.

Every separator style parses

deadbeef, de ad be ef, DE:AD:BE:EF, 0xde, 0xad, de-ad-be-ef, and hex wrapped over lines by a dump are all the same four bytes, so they all parse. Only actual hex digits count; grouping is grouping.

An odd digit count is an error

A byte needs two digits, so an odd count means one is missing — and only the source knows which end it was lost from. Padding it silently would invent a nibble that was never there, which is the kind of quiet wrong answer that survives all the way into a report.

Text, or a dump

Bytes are decoded as UTF-8 in strict mode. When they decode, you get text. When they do not — a compressed blob, a key, a header — you get a hex dump with offsets and an ASCII gutter, unprintable bytes shown as dots, the layout every hex editor uses.

48 65 6c 6c 6f is Hello. Going the other way, café becomes 63 61 66 c3 a9 — five bytes for four characters, because é is two bytes in UTF-8. That byte count is the thing worth noticing when a field limit is defined in bytes rather than characters.