Hex to text converter

How to convert hex to text

To convert hex to text, paste the hexadecimal in the converter above. Every two hex digits are one byte, and each byte is one character: for example, 48 65 6C 6C 6F 2C 20 57 6F 72 6C 64 21 is the text Hello, World!. Spaces, line breaks and 0x prefixes are ignored, and the result appears as you type.

Two hex digits, one byte

A byte has 256 values, which two hexadecimal digits cover exactly, from 00 to FF. That is why hex is the usual way to display raw data: it is compact and lines up neatly, with one byte for every two characters.

Bytes you will see often

Where hex strings come from

• Logs and network dumps, where text is shown as hex next to its readable form.
• Database fields and APIs that return binary data as a hex string.
• Security and forensics: decoding payloads, file headers and indicators.
• Puzzles and CTF games, where flags are often hidden as hex.

Common problems

• An odd number of digits: a digit is missing, so the last byte is incomplete.
• Non-hex characters: only 0 to 9 and A to F are valid; other letters mean a different format such as Base64.
• Garbled output: the data may not be text, or may use another encoding such as UTF-16.
• Percent codes (%20): those are URL encoding, which has its own decoder.

Hex and UTF-8

Accented letters and emoji use more than one byte in UTF-8, so they appear as two to four hex pairs; for example, the letter ü is C3 BC. If a decoded string shows odd symbols, this is the usual reason.

Private by design

The conversion runs in your browser, so what you type is never sent to a server.