Text Encoding

Text characters are represented by numbers in computers. Different encoding systems use different numbers for characters:

ASCII

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) encoding uses 7 bits to represent 128 characters, including English letters (both uppercase and lowercase), digits, and common punctuation symbols. Each ASCII character can be represented by a unique number between 0 and 127.

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding that can represent every character in the Unicode standard. It uses 1 to 4 bytes per character. UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII, meaning that the first 128 UTF-8 characters are identical to ASCII.

Conversion Process

Converting hexadecimal to text involves the following steps:

1. Parse the hexadecimal input into individual hex values, considering whether they are separated by spaces.
2. Convert each hexadecimal value to its decimal (base-10) equivalent.
3. Convert each decimal value to its corresponding character using the chosen encoding (ASCII or UTF-8).
4. Combine the characters to form the final text string.

Usage Notes

• Each hexadecimal value should be a valid 2-digit hex number (00-FF).
• When using ASCII encoding, any hexadecimal value outside the 7-bit ASCII range (00-7F in hex) will be converted to a question mark (?).
• UTF-8 encoding supports all Unicode characters, including special symbols, emojis, and characters from non-English languages.
• Some hexadecimal values may represent non-printable characters, which will be displayed as blank spaces or special symbols.