About the Hex Decode
This tool decodes hexadecimal back to text. It strips whatever separators are present, spaces, colons and 0x prefixes, so a hex dump, a MAC-style string or a run of code all decode without cleanup. The bytes are then interpreted as UTF-8, so multi-byte sequences become the correct characters.
An odd number of hex digits is reported as an error, since bytes come in pairs, and that normally means a digit was clipped at one end of the copy. Pasting from a full hex dump needs care for the same reason: the offset column on the left and the printable-ASCII column on the right of tools like xxd are made of digits and letters too, and they will be read as data. Keep only the byte column.
If the bytes are not valid UTF-8, because the hex represented binary data rather than text, the output may contain replacement characters; that indicates the source was not text. The Hex Encode tool produces this format, the Hex to Decimal converter is the one you want for numbers rather than text, and Base64 Decode covers the other common way of writing bytes as printable characters.
How to use
- Paste the hex, with or without separators.
- Read the decoded text.
- An odd digit count is reported as an error.
Common questions
- Does it matter what separator the hex uses?
- No. Spaces, colons and 0x prefixes are all stripped before decoding.
- Why do I get replacement characters?
- The bytes are not valid UTF-8 text, so some sequences cannot map to characters. The data was probably binary.
- It says odd number of digits. What does that mean?
- Each byte is two hex digits. An odd count means a digit is missing.