How to use the converter
Paste hexadecimal into the right box and the text appears on the left. You can paste hex with spaces between the bytes, as one long string, with 0x in front of each byte, or separated by commas or colons. Type in the left box to go the other way.
Choose whether to put spaces between bytes and whether to use capital letters for the digits A to F. Both are just a matter of style; 4a and 4A mean the same thing.
What hexadecimal is
Hexadecimal, or hex, is a way of writing numbers in base 16. It uses the digits 0 to 9 and then the letters A to F for ten to fifteen. One hex digit stands for four bits, so two hex digits make exactly one byte, from 00 to FF.
Programmers use hex because it is much shorter than binary and lines up neatly with bytes. You will see it in colour codes such as #FF0000 for red, in memory addresses, in network addresses and when looking at the raw contents of a file.
Text is stored as bytes using UTF-8. Ordinary English letters each use one byte, so Hello is 48 65 6C 6C 6F. Accented letters and emoji use two to four bytes each.
Colour codes on the web are a nice example: #FF8800 is three bytes, FF red, 88 green and 00 blue, which makes an orange.
Questions and answers
What is 48 65 6C 6C 6F in text?
Hello.
Does it matter if I include 0x?
No. The converter ignores 0x prefixes, spaces, commas and colons.
Why did it add a 0?
Every byte needs two hex digits. If the input has an odd number of digits, a 0 is added at the start so the bytes line up.
What is the difference between hex and binary?
Both store the same information. Binary uses two digits, and hex uses sixteen, so hex is four times shorter.