Text to Hex Converter

How to convert text to hex

Type or paste your text and the hex bytes appear immediately, two lowercase digits per byte. Nothing is uploaded, the encoding happens in the page.

The encoder is UTF-8, so plain English gives one byte per character while accents, symbols and emoji give two to four. The result is byte-for-byte what the same text would look like on disk.

• Type or paste the text, for example Hello.
• Read the hex output, for example 48 65 6c 6c 6f.
• Count the pairs if you want the byte length of the string.
• Compare against a hex editor to verify a file's contents.
• Press Copy result to take the hex bytes away.

Why hex is the default way to write bytes

A hex digit represents exactly four bits, so a byte is always two digits with no padding decisions to make. That alignment is the whole reason hex displaced octal for byte-level work: three bits per octal digit does not divide into eight, which is why octal file modes read cleanly but octal memory dumps do not.

It is also compact. The same byte is eight characters in binary, up to three in decimal, and always two in hex, which is why every hex editor, protocol trace, and memory dump uses it. Reading a hex pair back into bits is mechanical once you know the sixteen digits, and the high digit tells you the top nibble at a glance: anything from 00 to 7f is a plain ASCII character, and anything from 80 up is part of a multi-byte UTF-8 sequence.

• Space 20, tab 09, newline 0a, carriage return 0d.
• Digits 0 to 9 are 30 to 39; A to Z are 41 to 5a; a to z are 61 to 7a.
• Any byte from 80 to ff belongs to a multi-byte UTF-8 sequence.

Checking a file or a payload byte by byte

The practical use for this is verification. When a file will not parse, an API rejects a string, or a checksum disagrees, the question is usually whether the bytes on disk are the bytes you think they are. Encoding the expected text here and comparing against a hex editor answers that directly, because both are showing UTF-8 bytes in the same notation.

Two things show up constantly in that comparison. A file that begins ef bb bf carries a UTF-8 byte-order mark before your first real character, which breaks strict parsers. And a line that ends 0d 0a rather than 0a has Windows line endings, which is the usual explanation for a trailing carriage return that no editor will show you.