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ASCII to Hex Converter

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Hex is the programmer’s shorthand for bytes: two digits from 0-9 and A-F cover every value from 0 to 255 in a compact form. This converter takes ASCII text and returns the hex code for each character, which is what you need when you are writing a byte array in C, inspecting a network packet, or converting between encoding formats in a reverse-engineering session.

How ASCII becomes hex

  1. 1

    Paste your text

    Any ASCII character works — letters, numbers, punctuation.

  2. 2

    Each character is looked up as a byte

    For example, `H` is decimal 72, which is `0x48` in hex.

  3. 3

    Hex pairs are joined

    You can configure a separator: space, comma, `0x` prefix, or no delimiter at all.

  4. 4

    Copy the result

    Paste into source code, a hex editor, or a protocol analyser.

Worked example

The string Go! encodes as:

Char Decimal Hex
G 71 47
o 111 6F
! 33 21

So Go! becomes 47 6F 21, or \x47\x6F\x21 in C-string escape form, or 0x47, 0x6F, 0x21 as a byte array.

Output format options

Use case Format Example
Byte array in C/C++ 0xXX, 0xXX 0x47, 0x6F
Shell echo with -e \xXX \x47\x6F
Space-separated hex dump XX XX 47 6F
Continuous string XXXX 476F
URL percent-encoding %XX %47%6F

A common trap

Hex is case-insensitive (0x4f and 0x4F are the same byte), but many parsers care. If you are feeding the output into something strict (a YAML file, a JSON string, some assemblers), match the case convention of the surrounding code.

UTF-8 and multi-byte characters

For ASCII input every character is one byte. For UTF-8 input, characters above U+007F take 2, 3 or 4 bytes. The tool always emits one hex pair per byte, so caf\u00e9 (4 characters) produces 5 bytes of hex: 63 61 66 C3 A9.

Frequently Asked Questions

The value is not — 0x4F and 0x4f are the same byte. But some tools and code styles insist on one case. Pythons .hex()` method emits lowercase; many embedded toolchains prefer uppercase.

It is a convention from C telling the parser that the following digits are hexadecimal, not decimal. Without the prefix, 47 is either 47 (decimal) or 71 (hex) depending on context.

Probably because your source contains non-ASCII UTF-8 characters, which take multiple bytes. A 10-character string with accents can easily produce 12-14 bytes of hex.

Yes — use the Hex to ASCII Converter. It accepts continuous hex, space-separated pairs, and 0x prefixes.

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