Paste a hexadecimal value to see it as a decimal number, as binary, as octal and, when the bytes make sense, as text. Or go the other way: enter a decimal number or a piece of text and get the hex. Spaces, colons and 0x prefixes are all accepted.
Hexadecimal counts in sixteens. The digits are 0 to 9 and then A to F for the values 10 to 15, so the two-digit number 3C means three sixteens plus twelve, which is 60. Because 16 is a power of two, every hex digit lines up with exactly four binary digits, and two of them line up with a byte.
That alignment is the reason programmers prefer hex to decimal when looking at raw data. The byte 11111111 is 255 in decimal but simply FF in hex, and the 24-bit colour 255, 136, 0 is FF8800, with each pair being one colour channel.
Text is stored as numbers. In ASCII, the capital letter A is 65, which is 41 in hex; the space character is 20 in hex. UTF-8 extends this so that all the world's writing systems fit, using one byte for the basic English range and up to four for rarer characters. When you convert text here, you see the real bytes that would be sent over a network or saved in a file.
Going from hex to text is only meaningful when the bytes were text to begin with. A hash such as an MD5 or SHA value is a number written in hex, and decoding it as text produces nonsense. The decimal and binary rows are the right reading for numbers and the text row is the right reading for strings.
If you only need numbers in other bases, the binary converter gives a grouped binary display and works from any base.
Give each digit a place value that is a power of 16 (1, 16, 256, 4096 and so on, from the right) and add up digit x place. For 2F: 2 x 16 + 15 = 47.
Divide by 16 repeatedly and write the remainders from last to first, using A to F for 10 to 15. For 255: 255 / 16 = 15 r 15, so FF.
Split the hex into pairs, treat each pair as a byte, and read the bytes as UTF-8. 48 65 6C 6C 6F is the bytes 72, 101, 108, 108, 111, which spell Hello.
Either the number of digits is odd, or the bytes are not valid UTF-8 text. For example FF on its own is not a valid character, so only the number rows are shown.
Hex is a compact way to write binary data. One hex digit equals four bits, so web colours, memory addresses, MAC addresses and file checksums are all written in hex.
Related: Binary converter, Hex colour picker, Case converter.
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