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

This can be done with a stringstream, you just need to store the value in an intermediate numeric type such as an int:

  std::string test = "01A1"; // assuming this is an even length string
  char bytes[test.length()/2];
  stringstream converter;
  for(int i = 0; i < test.length(); i+=2)
  {
      converter << std::hex << test.substr(i,2);
      int byte;
      converter >> byte;
      bytes[i/2] = byte & 0xFF;
      converter.str(std::string());
      converter.clear();
  }

Answer 2

This implementation uses the built-in strtol function to handle the actual conversion from text to bytes, but will work for any even-length hex string.

std::vector<char> HexToBytes(const std::string& hex) {
  std::vector<char> bytes;

  for (unsigned int i = 0; i < hex.length(); i += 2) {
    std::string byteString = hex.substr(i, 2);
    char byte = (char) strtol(byteString.c_str(), NULL, 16);
    bytes.push_back(byte);
  }

  return bytes;
}

Answer 3

If you can make your data to look like this e.g array of "0x01", "0xA1" Then you can iterate your array and use sscanf to create the array of values

unsigned int result;
sscanf(data, "%x", &result);         

Answer 4

So for fun, I was curious if I could do this kind of conversion at compile-time. It doesn't have a lot of error checking and was done in VS2015, which doesn't support C++14 constexpr functions yet (thus how HexCharToInt looks). It takes a c-string array, converts pairs of characters into a single byte and expands those bytes into a uniform initialization list used to initialize the T type provided as a template parameter. T could be replaced with something like std::array to automatically return an array.

#include <cstdint>
#include <initializer_list>
#include <stdexcept>
#include <utility>

/* Quick and dirty conversion from a single character to its hex equivelent */
constexpr std::uint8_t HexCharToInt(char Input)
{
    return
    ((Input >= 'a') && (Input <= 'f'))
    ? (Input - 87)
    : ((Input >= 'A') && (Input <= 'F'))
    ? (Input - 55)
    : ((Input >= '0') && (Input <= '9'))
    ? (Input - 48)
    : throw std::exception{};
}

/* Position the characters into the appropriate nibble */
constexpr std::uint8_t HexChar(char High, char Low)
{
    return (HexCharToInt(High) << 4) | (HexCharToInt(Low));
}

/* Adapter that performs sets of 2 characters into a single byte and combine the results into a uniform initialization list used to initialize T */
template <typename T, std::size_t Length, std::size_t ... Index>
constexpr T HexString(const char (&Input)[Length], const std::index_sequence<Index...>&)
{
    return T{HexChar(Input[(Index * 2)], Input[((Index * 2) + 1)])...};
}

/* Entry function */
template <typename T, std::size_t Length>
constexpr T HexString(const char (&Input)[Length])
{
    return HexString<T>(Input, std::make_index_sequence<(Length / 2)>{});
}

constexpr auto Y = KS::Utility::HexString<std::array<std::uint8_t, 3>>("ABCDEF");

Answer 5

If you want to use OpenSSL to do it, there is a nifty trick I found:

BIGNUM *input = BN_new();
int input_length = BN_hex2bn(&input, argv[2]);
input_length = (input_length + 1) / 2; // BN_hex2bn() returns number of hex digits
unsigned char *input_buffer = (unsigned char*)malloc(input_length);
retval = BN_bn2bin(input, input_buffer);

Just be sure to strip off any leading '0x' to the string.

Answer 6

You can use boost:

#include <boost/algorithm/hex.hpp>

char bytes[60] = {0}; 
std::string hash = boost::algorithm::unhex(std::string("313233343536373839")); 
std::copy(hash.begin(), hash.end(), bytes);