2016-12-05



How do you convert hex to binary, if not by  hand?  --  It's  in-
teresting  that  all  non-programmers  have  binary  in mind when
thinking about  computer  stuff,  but  no  programmer  ever  uses
binary,  their  lowest  level  is  hex  ... which makes perfectly
sense. -- Well, I wanted to have  the  binary  encoding  of  some
ASCII string. I did the converting of the characters to hex manu-
ally with the manpage ascii(7). I could have used hd(1) as  well.
Then from hex to binary, I could have easily done it by hand, but
it found it to tedious. Thus, I used bc(1):

     $ bc -q <<!
     > obase=2
     > ibase=16
     > 666F6F
     > !
     11001100110111101101111

(You have to concatenate the hex bytes  and  (unfortunately)  you
have to enter A-F in upper case.)

The result is what I wanted, but you  should  note  that  leading
zeros  are  missing!  If you convert to bin this way, ensure that
you fill up with zeros until the byte boundary.




http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>