Convert a string representation of a hex dump to a

Question

I am looking for a way to convert a long string (from a dump), that represents hex values into a byte array.

I couldn't have phrased it better than the person that posted the same question here.

But to keep it original, I'll phrase it my own way: suppose I have a string "00A0BF" that I would like interpreted as the

byte[] {0x00,0xA0,0xBf}

what should I do?

I am a Java novice and ended up using BigInteger and watching out for leading hex zeros. But I think it is ugly and I am sure I am missing something simple.

Answer 1

The Code presented by Bert Regelink simply does not work. Try the following:

import javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter;
import java.io.*;

public class Test
{  
    @Test
    public void testObjectStreams( ) throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException
    {     
            ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
            ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(baos);

            String stringTest = "TEST";
            oos.writeObject( stringTest );

            oos.close();
            baos.close();

            byte[] bytes = baos.toByteArray();
            String hexString = DatatypeConverter.printHexBinary( bytes);
            byte[] reconvertedBytes = DatatypeConverter.parseHexBinary(hexString);

            assertArrayEquals( bytes, reconvertedBytes );

            ByteArrayInputStream bais = new ByteArrayInputStream(reconvertedBytes);
            ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(bais);

            String readString = (String) ois.readObject();

            assertEquals( stringTest, readString);
        }
    }

Answer 2

Late to the party, but I have amalgamated the answer above by DaveL into a class with the reverse action - just in case it helps.

public final class HexString {
    private static final char[] digits = "0123456789ABCDEF".toCharArray();

    private HexString() {}

    public static final String fromBytes(final byte[] bytes) {
        final StringBuilder buf = new StringBuilder();
        for (int i = 0; i < bytes.length; i++) {
            buf.append(HexString.digits[(bytes[i] >> 4) & 0x0f]);
            buf.append(HexString.digits[bytes[i] & 0x0f]);
        }
        return buf.toString();
    }

    public static final byte[] toByteArray(final String hexString) {
        if ((hexString.length() % 2) != 0) {
            throw new IllegalArgumentException("Input string must contain an even number of characters");
        }
        final int len = hexString.length();
        final byte[] data = new byte[len / 2];
        for (int i = 0; i < len; i += 2) {
            data[i / 2] = (byte) ((Character.digit(hexString.charAt(i), 16) << 4)
                    + Character.digit(hexString.charAt(i + 1), 16));
        }
        return data;
    }
}

And JUnit test class:

public class TestHexString {

    @Test
    public void test() {
        String[] tests = {"0FA1056D73", "", "00", "0123456789ABCDEF", "FFFFFFFF"};

        for (int i = 0; i < tests.length; i++) {
            String in = tests[i];
            byte[] bytes = HexString.toByteArray(in);
            String out = HexString.fromBytes(bytes);
            System.out.println(in); //DEBUG
            System.out.println(out); //DEBUG
            Assert.assertEquals(in, out);

        }

    }

}

Answer 3

For what it's worth, here's another version which supports odd length strings, without resorting to string concatenation.

public static byte[] hexStringToByteArray(String input) {
    int len = input.length();

    if (len == 0) {
        return new byte[] {};
    }

    byte[] data;
    int startIdx;
    if (len % 2 != 0) {
        data = new byte[(len / 2) + 1];
        data[0] = (byte) Character.digit(input.charAt(0), 16);
        startIdx = 1;
    } else {
        data = new byte[len / 2];
        startIdx = 0;
    }

    for (int i = startIdx; i < len; i += 2) {
        data[(i + 1) / 2] = (byte) ((Character.digit(input.charAt(i), 16) << 4)
                + Character.digit(input.charAt(i+1), 16));
    }
    return data;
}

Answer 4

By far not the cleanest solution. But it works for me and is well formatted:

private String createHexDump(byte[] msg, String description) {
    System.out.println();
    String result = "\n" + description;
    int currentIndex = 0;
    for(int i=0 ; i<msg.length ; i++){
        currentIndex++;
        if(i == 0){
            result += String.format("\n  %04x ", i);
        }
        if(i % 16 == 0 && i != 0){
            result += " | ";
            for(int j=(i-16) ; j<msg.length && j<i ; j++) {
                char characterToAdd = (char) msg[j];
                if (characterToAdd == '\n') {
                    characterToAdd = ' ';
                }
                result += characterToAdd;
            }

            result += String.format("\n  %04x ", i);
        }

        result += String.format("%02x ", msg[i]);
    }

    if(currentIndex % 16 != 0){
        int fitIns = msg.length / 16;
        int leftOvers = msg.length - (fitIns * 16);
        for(int i=0 ; i<16-leftOvers ; i++){
            result += "   ";
        }

        result += " | ";

        for(int i=msg.length-leftOvers ; i<msg.length ; i++){
            char characterToAdd = (char) msg[i];
            if (characterToAdd == '\n') {
                characterToAdd = ' ';
            }
            result += characterToAdd;
        }
    }

    result += "\n";

    return result;
}

The output:

  S -> C
    0000 0b 00 2e 06 4d 6f 72 69 74 7a 53 6f 6d 65 20 54  |  .Heyyy Some T
    0010 43 50 20 73 74 75 66 66 20 49 20 63 61 70 74 75  | CP stuff I captu
    0020 72 65 64 2e 2e 77 65 6c 6c 20 66 6f 72 6d 61 74  | red..well format
    0030 3f                                               | ?

Answer 5

Here is a method that actually works (based on several previous semi-correct answers):

private static byte[] fromHexString(final String encoded) {
    if ((encoded.length() % 2) != 0)
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Input string must contain an even number of characters");

    final byte result[] = new byte[encoded.length()/2];
    final char enc[] = encoded.toCharArray();
    for (int i = 0; i < enc.length; i += 2) {
        StringBuilder curr = new StringBuilder(2);
        curr.append(enc[i]).append(enc[i + 1]);
        result[i/2] = (byte) Integer.parseInt(curr.toString(), 16);
    }
    return result;
}

The only possible issue that I can see is if the input string is extremely long; calling toCharArray() makes a copy of the string's internal array.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way, bytes are signed in Java, so your input string converts to [0, -96, -65] instead of [0, 160, 191]. But you probably knew that already.

Answer 6

In android ,if you are working with hex, you can try okio.

simple usage:

byte[] bytes = ByteString.decodeHex("c000060000").toByteArray();

and result will be

[-64, 0, 6, 0, 0]