CIPHERNAUT
csen
Cipher catalogue
EncodingDifficulty: Medium

Hexadecimal code (hex)

Every character becomes a pair of digits 0-9 and letters A-F. A compact notation programmers love.

Try it

27 characters

Result · Hexadecimal code (hex)

53 65 63 72 65 74 20 6D 65 73 73 61 67 65 20 66 6F 72 20 74 68 65 20 63 6C 75 62

How it works

  1. 1A character has a number inside a computer, for example A is 65. Hexadecimal counts up to sixteen: digits 0-9, then A, B, C, D, E, F.
  2. 2The number 65 is written 41 in hex (4 times 16 plus 1). So A is 41.
  3. 3Each character gets two digits, separated by spaces: HELLO is 48 45 4C 4C 4F.
  4. 4Accented letters take more bytes, so they get more pairs: č is C4 8D.
  5. 5To decode, turn each pair into a number (first digit times 16 plus the second) and look up the character.

Example

INFORMATION

49 4E 46 4F 52 4D 41 54 49 4F 4E

Did you know

Hexadecimal is a handy shorthand for binary: one byte fits exactly into two hex digits. The ASCII character code appeared in 1963, and UTF-8, which covers accents and other scripts, was sketched in September 1992 by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. You still meet hex every day in web colours: #FF0000 is red.

Try to decode

This message is encrypted with Hexadecimal code (hex) using the default settings:

48 45 58 20 49 53 20 46 55 4E

Hint

Each pair is one character. A space is 20, the letter A is 41.

Show solution

HEX IS FUN

More ciphers in this category