Convert Hex to String

You’re probably using the wrong encoding. UTF-8 encodes the character “é” as two bytes: C3 A9. If you decode those two bytes as Latin-1 (one char per byte), you get “Ô + “©” = “é”. Switch the Encoding selector to UTF-8 and you’ll get the single character “é” as intended.

ASCII is 7-bit only (bytes 0-127), one char per byte – simple. “String” is more general: it can mean UTF-8 (variable 1-4 bytes per char, today’s default), UTF-16 (2 or 4 bytes), or legacy Latin-1. This tool exposes an encoding selector; the ASCII tool hard-codes 7-bit interpretation. If your hex contains any byte > 0x7F, you almost certainly want this tool, not the ASCII one.

UTF-8 is the modern default – variable-width, backward-compatible with ASCII, used by the web and Unix. Latin-1 is fixed 1 byte per char, covering basic Western European letters. UTF-16LE/BE is 2 bytes per char (with surrogate pairs for supplementary planes), standard on Windows and in Java’s native strings. ASCII strict errors on any byte > 127.

In strict mode, invalid byte sequences for the chosen encoding (e.g., a lone 0xFF in UTF-8) trigger an error and stop decoding. In lenient mode (default), invalid bytes are replaced with the Unicode replacement character U+FFFD (shown as “�”). Use strict when validating data integrity; use lenient for best-effort recovery.

Because different workflows need different handling. Escape makes every control byte visible as xNN – best for debugging binary data. Placeholder (·) is cleanest for text that has occasional control chars you want to ignore visually. Raw preserves the original control chars – good when you’re piping into something that expects them (shells, parsers), dangerous when pasting into a browser textbox.

You get an error: “hex must have even number of digits”. Every byte needs 2 hex digits – odd-length input is ambiguous. Prepend or append a zero if you know which side you meant.

Yes – the browser’s native TextDecoder handles surrogate pairs correctly for both UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE. A surrogate pair (4 bytes in UTF-16) decodes to the single supplementary-plane character it represents (emoji, rare scripts, etc.).

Practically unlimited. The algorithm is O(n) and TextDecoder is browser-optimized. 1 MB of hex (500,000 bytes of input data) decodes in under 50 ms on a modern laptop. Very large pastes may take a moment to render in the output textarea but decoding itself stays fast.

No. All decoding runs in your browser’s JavaScript engine via the native TextDecoder API. No network requests fire during conversion, no server stores or logs your hex. You can verify with your browser’s Network tab. The tool works offline after the initial page load.

Use our “String to Hex” converter. The browser’s TextEncoder encodes the string to UTF-8 bytes by default; for other encodings, you’d need manual byte-level handling. Round-trips are lossless as long as the input text is valid for the chosen encoding.