Literal Hex to ASCII Conversion

TurnipTruck · January 2007

Greetings,

I am trying to translate a literal hex string to the ASCII characters it represents.

Example: '46726F6E74' needs to be translated to 'Front'

I have looked at FORMAT, HEXTOI, etc with no luck.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Marc Scheibein · January 2007

I don't know a ready-to-use programming instruction which will do this.

Assuming a single byte is represented always with 2 characters, only a self made function may do this.

DEFINE_FUNCTION CHAR[15] AsciiHexToBytes(CHAR sStr[30])
{
STACK_VAR CHAR sByteAscii[2]
STACK_VAR CHAR sHexString[15] // the output string
STACK_VAR INTEGER nByteCount // how much real bytes
STACK_VAR INTEGER nX // for the FOR loop
nByteCount = LENGTH_STRING(sStr) / 2 // how much "real" Bytes are there
FOR(nX=1;nX<=nByteCount;nX++)
{
sByteAscii = GET_BUFFER_STRING(sStr,2)
sHexString = "sHexString,HEXTOI(sByteAscii)"
}
RETURN sHexString
}

If the byte values are matching the ASCII table, you'll get your "Text".

Should do that - theoredically

. Don't have a master to test at the moment.....

yuri · January 2007

ITOA(HEXTOI(strHexString))

trav · January 2007

Or if you are getting it in as comma seperated hex values, just bung it in a char array.

Marc Scheibein · January 2007

yuri wrote:

ITOA(HEXTOI(strHexString))

Hm....
HEXTOI('3132') -> 12594
ITOA(12594) -> '12594'

But if handling that 4 chars '3132' as "2 bytes" (what my function above may do), the result of the function is " '12' "

Other example:
HEXTOI('595A') -> 22874
ITOA(22874) -> '22874'
But the function result may be " 'YZ' "

mpullin · January 2007

I'd worry about exceeding the maximum integer size if I were doing HEXTOI on the whole thing. Marc's function seems like the way to go.

yuri · January 2007

i will post three

next time to denote the amount of sarcasm

mpullin · January 2007

yuri wrote:

i will post three next time to denote the amount of sarcasm

umm... lol?

TurnipTruck · January 2007

Thank you Marc and others. I will code up the function that Marc suggests and see what happens. I did something similar in the past, but it resulted in compiler warnings.

Marc Scheibein · January 2007

yuri wrote:

i will post three next time to denote the amount of sarcasm

Ok, don't see my message as "I have not seen the sarcasm" but as "I just wanted to show what's the difference for those who are interested" (n+1

)

TurnipTruck · January 2007

Back on topic here......

The HEXTOI conversion works well. It may be recommended that the string which will hold the converted value not have its type defined. If declared as a CHAR array, you may get a compiler warning when you try to put an integer value into it.

DEFINE_VARIABLE

CHAR cORIGINAL_STRING[32]
cCONVERTED_STRING[16]

Thank you for your help.

DHawthorne · January 2007

TurnipTruck wrote:

Back on topic here......

The HEXTOI conversion works well. It may be recommended that the string which will hold the converted value not have its type defined. If declared as a CHAR array, you may get a compiler warning when you try to put an integer value into it.

DEFINE_VARIABLE

CHAR cORIGINAL_STRING[32]
cCONVERTED_STRING[16]

Thank you for your help.

Not declaring a type is the same as flat -out declaring it INTEGER; that's the default variable type. Maybe I'm just being nit-picky here, but if your problem is assigning an integer value to an array position that really ought to have a CHAR, you should fix it on the other end rather than making an integer array. TYPE_CAST() is made for just such situations as this.

Literal Hex to ASCII Conversion

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