Converting a hex string to a byte array

Question

What is the best way to convert a variable length hex string e.g. \"01A1\" to a byte array containing that data.

i.e converting this:

st         


        

Answer 1

C++11 variant (with gcc 4.7 - little endian format):

    #include 
    #include 

    std::vector decodeHex(const std::string & source)
    {
        if ( std::string::npos != source.find_first_not_of("0123456789ABCDEFabcdef") )
        {
            // you can throw exception here
            return {};
        }

        union
        {
            uint64_t binary;
            char byte[8];
        } value{};

        auto size = source.size(), offset = (size % 16);
        std::vector binary{};
        binary.reserve((size + 1) / 2);

        if ( offset )
        {
            value.binary = std::stoull(source.substr(0, offset), nullptr, 16);

            for ( auto index = (offset + 1) / 2; index--; )
            {
                binary.emplace_back(value.byte[index]);
            }
        }

        for ( ; offset < size; offset += 16 )
        {
            value.binary = std::stoull(source.substr(offset, 16), nullptr, 16);
            for ( auto index = 8; index--; )
            {
                binary.emplace_back(value.byte[index]);
            }
        }

        return binary;
    }

Crypto++ variant (with gcc 4.7):

#include 
#include 

#include 
#include 

std::vector decodeHex(const std::string & source)
{
    std::string hexCode;
    CryptoPP::StringSource(
              source, true,
              new CryptoPP::HexDecoder(new CryptoPP::StringSink(hexCode)));

    return std::vector(hexCode.begin(), hexCode.end());
}

Note that the first variant is about two times faster than the second one and at the same time works with odd and even number of nibbles (the result of "a56ac" is {0x0a, 0x56, 0xac}). Crypto++ discards the last one if there are odd number of nibbels (the result of "a56ac" is {0xa5, 0x6a}) and silently skips invalid hex characters (the result of "a5sac" is {0xa5, 0xac}).