Convert Hex to Text

This one is UTF-8-focused and adds a hex-dump input mode that parses xxd, hexdump -C, and Wireshark copy-as-hex output directly – strip-offset, strip-sidebar is automatic. The hex-to-string tool has a full encoding selector (UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin-1, ASCII) but only accepts raw hex input. Pick this one when you’re pasting dump output; pick that one when you need non-UTF-8 decoding.

Three common ones. xxd: 00000000: 4865 6c6c 6f20 576f 726c 640a Hello World. (offset + colon + hex groups + ASCII sidebar). hexdump -C: 00000000 48 65 6c 6c 6f |Hello| (offset + double-space + hex + pipe-wrapped sidebar). Wireshark Copy as Hex Stream: bare hex, handled by Raw mode. The parser is tolerant of variations – as long as a line starts with hex offset and the ASCII sidebar is separated by 2+ spaces or pipe characters.

Correctly. The tool uses the browser’s native TextDecoder, which handles 1-byte ASCII, 2-byte Latin scripts (C3 A9 = “é”), 3-byte BMP chars (E2 98 83 = “☃”), and 4-byte supplementary-plane chars (F0 9F 98 80 = “😀”). An emoji that looks like a single character on screen may be 4 bytes in UTF-8.

Validating the byte sequence before decoding. Strict mode errors on malformed UTF-8 (lone continuation bytes, overlong encodings, orphan high bytes) so you know the input is corrupt. Lenient mode (default) substitutes U+FFFD (�) for each invalid sequence and keeps going – useful for best-effort recovery.

Binary data often includes control bytes: x00 (null), x0A (newline), x1B (escape), x7F (DEL), etc. If you’re decoding a packet capture or a binary protocol payload, you’ll see these. Escape mode reveals them explicitly, Placeholder mode hides them under a dot, Raw mode emits the literal char (which can corrupt display if your terminal interprets them).

Yes – that’s the primary use case for Hex dump mode. Paste the full output of xxd file.bin (all the lines with offsets), switch the Input mode to “Hex dump”, and the tool concatenates all the hex bytes across lines and decodes the whole file as UTF-8 text. Non-text files will decode to mostly escape sequences – expected behavior.

Error: “hex must have even number of digits”. Every byte needs 2 hex digits; odd length is ambiguous. In Raw mode, check your input for accidentally-dropped digits. In Hex dump mode, this shouldn’t happen unless the dump itself is truncated mid-byte.

It decodes the bytes as UTF-8 regardless of file type. For actual text files that’s fine. For images, binaries, or non-text data, the output will be mostly escape sequences or U+FFFD replacements – which is correct (that data simply isn’t UTF-8 text). Use a hex editor if you need to view binary structure, not this tool.

No. All decoding runs in your browser via the native TextDecoder API. No network requests, no server-side storage, no logs. Confirm in your browser’s Network tab: no outbound traffic during conversion. The tool works offline after the initial page load.

Use our “Text to Hex” or “String to Hex” converter. Or in code: [...new TextEncoder().encode(str)].map(b => b.toString(16).padStart(2, '0')).join(' ') in JavaScript. The round-trip is lossless for any valid UTF-8 text.