how can i decode a hex string?

Question

How can I decode a hex string to an ascii string? I want to find the meaning of

559EF4BE-D2E1-4009-AF7B-F81784946A89

or

81CB80D6-62C3-4BC8-99BE-31D7C6E739A4

Thanks

What do you mean by "the meaning" of those? They look like GUIDs to me. You also haven't specified what language you're using, which makes it hard to answer... — Jon Skeet, Jun 28 '12 at 06:37
Refer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9227246/hex-to-ascii-in-c for C and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4785654/covert-a-string-of-hex-into-ascii-in-java for Java — Gaurav Agrawal, Jun 28 '12 at 06:43

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 28 '12 at 06:39

1

This looks like a GUID which is just a complex id number. They did historically carry some information about the system they were created on but nowadays is just random.

answered Jun 28 '12 at 06:39

Emil Vikström

90,431
16
141
175

Thanks for your answer.I didnt use any programing language to create these strings , but i need to use one to decode them.they are some words which have been changed to hex strings.I need the algorithm that changes them back to ascii mode. – Abadis Jun 28 '12 at 06:44

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 28 '12 at 06:54

Just a small clarification: 'ASCII string' refers to the charset used to represent the characters, not whether or not these chars are represented as int, hex or as printable characters...

Anyways, what I assume you actually want is a program which will show the printable version of the characters. So here's one way to do it in python:

import re

pattern = "559EF4BE-D2E1-4009-AF7B-F81784946A89" #replace this with the hex string you want
hex_list = re.findall("[a-zA-Z0-9]{2}",pattern)
for h in hex_list:
    i = int(h,16)
    ascii_val = chr(i)
    print ascii_val,

Good luck.

BTW, hex strings as you presented them, are not usually meant to represent strings. Are you sure that's what you need?

how can i decode a hex string?

2 Answers2