I am a big fan of plain text. It is easy to view and easy to edit. Unfortunately, it is sometimes necessary to work with binary files and data.
Ruby’s inspect method does a decent job of showing the contents of a binary string, but sometimes I need something a little more powerful.
Back in the day I would use a hex editor to open binary files and decipher their contents. I don’t have a need for a hex editor anymore, but I would like to occasionally view binary data in the same format.
After some intense Googling and Ruby doc reading, I came up with a few methods to convert a binary string to hex, and convert a string of hex back to the original binary.
Bin to Hex
To convert a string to it hex representation, first take each byte, convert it to hex, then join all of the hex digits back together.
def bin_to_hex(s)
s.each_byte.map { |b| b.to_s(16) }.join
end
If you like spaces between the hex digits, change join to join(‘ ‘)
Hex to Bin
Converting the string of hex digits back to binary is just as easy. Take the hex digits two at a time (since each byte can range from 00 to FF), convert the digits to a character, and join them back together.
def hex_to_bin(s)
s.scan(/../).map { |x| x.hex.chr }.join
end
If you find yourself using these frequently in a project, you could add the methods to the String class.
TIMTOWTDI
Of course, there is more than one way to do this. Ruby also provides the handy pack and unpack methods for Arrays and Strings respectively. These are a little more cryptic since you need to know the meaning of the format string to understand what’s going on.
def bin_to_hex(s)
s.unpack('H*').first
end
def hex_to_bin(s)
s.scan(/../).map { |x| x.hex }.pack('c*')
end
Check the Ruby documentation for Array and String for a complete explanation of pack and unpack.
Examples
Here’s the output of a quick IRB session to demonstrate how this works.
irb(main):001:0> s = "Hello, World!"
=> "Hello, World!"
irb(main):002:0> s = s.each_byte.map { |b| b.to\_s(16) }.join
=> "48656c6c6f2c20576f726c6421"
irb(main):003:0> s = s.scan(/../).map { |x| x.hex.chr }.join
=> "Hello, World!"
These methods are no replacement for a hex editor, but if you need to check an encryption key or some other short string of binary, they can be just the thing.