Text to Hex Converter

What is hexadecimal, and what does this page convert?

Hexadecimal is base 16. It uses sixteen digits: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F, where A is 10 and F is 15.

It is popular for one specific reason: a byte holds a value from 0 to 255, and that range fits exactly into two hex digits. 00 is the lowest byte, FF is the highest. One byte is always two hex digits, with no leftover, which makes hex the natural shorthand for raw data.

How to convert text to hex bytes

1. Pick a direction Text → Hex encodes what you type. Hex → Text decodes pairs of digits back into characters.
2. Set the output format Choose the separator (space, none, colon, comma, or one byte per line), whether digits are uppercase, and whether each byte carries a 0x prefix. Different tools expect different shapes.
3. Read the stats row Character count, byte count, hex digit count and average bytes per character update as you type. When bytes exceed characters, the input contains non-ASCII text.
4. Optionally open the hex dump The dump shows offset, hex bytes and printable ASCII side by side, 16 bytes per row — the same layout as xxd or hexdump -C.

Examples: bytes are not code points

This is the detail that trips up most hex tools. A character's Unicode code point and its UTF-8 bytes are different numbers.

Notice é: the code point is E9, but the UTF-8 encoding is C3 A9. A converter that simply prints the code point in hex would output E9 and produce a byte stream no UTF-8 reader can decode. This page encodes real bytes, and the per-character table below the editors shows both numbers so the difference is visible.

A full word, encoded:

Input:  café
Output: 63 61 66 c3 a9

c=63  a=61  f=66  é=c3 a9   → 4 characters, 5 bytes

Byte notation you will see in the wild

The same five bytes get written many different ways depending on the tool that produced them:

The 0x prefix is not part of the value. It is a marker telling a compiler or reader "the digits that follow are base 16", exactly as 0b means binary. When decoding, this tool strips 0x and \x prefixes along with spaces, commas, colons, semicolons, dashes and pipes, so you can paste any of the shapes above without cleaning it up first.

Common mistakes when decoding hex

• An odd number of digits. 4a5 cannot be split into bytes. Almost always a leading zero was dropped: 4a 05, not 4a5. The error message says how many digits were found so you can spot where the pair is missing.
• Single-digit tokens. 4a 5 6c is ambiguous — is 5 the byte 05 or the start of 56? Rather than guess, the decoder asks you to write it as 05.
• Bytes that are not text. Compressed data, a JPEG, or an encryption key will not decode to readable characters. Strict UTF-8 decoding reports the failure instead of filling your output with replacement characters, and a lossy fallback is shown separately so you can still inspect it.
• Confusing hex with Base64. Both turn binary into printable text, but hex uses 16 characters and doubles the size, while Base64 uses 64 characters and adds about a third. If your string contains letters past F, or + and /, it is Base64 — use the Base64 Encoder & Decoder.
• Assuming ASCII. Byte C3 on its own is not a character. It is the first half of a two-byte sequence. Tools that decode byte-by-byte with Latin-1 turn café into café, which is the classic mojibake signature.

Use cases for byte-level hex

• Identifying a file from its header. Paste the first bytes of an unknown file: 89 50 4E 47 is PNG, FF D8 FF is JPEG, 25 50 44 46 is PDF, 50 4B 03 04 is ZIP.
• Debugging encoding bugs. When text arrives garbled, converting both the expected and received strings to hex shows exactly which bytes changed.
• Reading protocol traces. Serial, Modbus, MQTT and BLE logs are hex. Decoding a payload section reveals embedded ASCII fields.
• Writing byte literals. Turn a string into 0x-prefixed bytes to paste into firmware or a test fixture.
• Checking invisible characters. A zero-width space is E2 80 8B and a non-breaking space is C2 A0. Both look like nothing in an editor but appear plainly in hex.
• Verifying database BLOB values. MySQL and PostgreSQL print binary columns as continuous hex; decoding shows whether the stored value is what you expect.

Privacy and how conversion runs

Encoding uses the browser's TextEncoder and decoding uses TextDecoder in strict mode. Both run in the page, so your text is not uploaded to convert it.