Simpe online base16 encoding decoding tool

Short introduction

Base16 is a binary to text encoding in the family that also contains Base32, Base58, and Base64. Data is broken into 4-bit sequences, and each value (0-15) is encoded as a character. Although any 16 characters could be used, in practice, the ASCII digits "0"–"9" and letters "A"–"F" (or "a"–"f") are used to align with the typical notation for hex numbers.

Support for Base16 encoding is ubiquitous in modern computing. It is the basis for the W3C standard for URL percent encoding, where a character is replaced with a percent sign "%" and its Base16-encoded form. Most modern programming languages directly include support for formatting and parsing Base16-encoded numbers.

Advantages of Base16 encoding include:

Most programming languages have facilities to parse ASCII-encoded hex

Being exactly half a byte, 4-bits is easier to process than the 5 or 6 bits of Base32 and Base64, respectively The notation is well-known and easily understood without needing a symbol lookup table Many CPU architectures have dedicated instructions that allow access to a half-byte (aka nibble), making it more efficient in hardware than Base32 and Base64

Disadvantages include:

Space efficiency is only 50%, since each 4-bit value from the original data will be encoded as an 8-bit byte; in contrast, Base32 and Base64 encodings have a space efficiency of 63% and 75% respectively Complexity of accepting both upper and lower case letters

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