Conversion hex string into ascii in bash command line

Question

I have a lot of this kind of string and I want to find a command to convert it in ascii, I tried with echo -e and od, but it did not work.

0xA7.0x9B.0x46.0x8D.0x1E.0x52.0xA7.0x9B.0x7B.0x31.0xD2

Answer 1

This worked for me.

$ echo 54657374696e672031203220330 | xxd -r -p
Testing 1 2 3$

-r tells it to convert hex to ascii as opposed to its normal mode of doing the opposite

-p tells it to use a plain format.

Answer 2

This code will convert the text 0xA7.0x9B.0x46.0x8D.0x1E.0x52.0xA7.0x9B.0x7B.0x31.0xD2 into a stream of 11 bytes with equivalent values. These bytes will be written to standard out.

TESTDATA=$(echo '0xA7.0x9B.0x46.0x8D.0x1E.0x52.0xA7.0x9B.0x7B.0x31.0xD2' | tr '.' ' ')
for c in $TESTDATA; do
    echo $c | xxd -r
done

As others have pointed out, this will not result in a printable ASCII string for the simple reason that the specified bytes are not ASCII. You need post more information about how you obtained this string for us to help you with that.

How it works: xxd -r translates hexadecimal data to binary (like a reverse hexdump). xxd requires that each line start off with the index number of the first character on the line (run hexdump on something and see how each line starts off with an index number). In our case we want that number to always be zero, since each execution only has one line. As luck would have it, our data already has zeros before every character as part of the 0x notation. The lower case x is ignored by xxd, so all we have to do is pipe each 0xhh character to xxd and let it do the work.

The tr translates periods to spaces so that for will split it up correctly.

Answer 3

You can use xxd:

$cat hex.txt
68 65 6c 6c 6f
$cat hex.txt | xxd -r -p
hello

Answer 4

You can use something like this.

$ cat test_file.txt
54 68 69 73 20 69 73 20 74 65 78 74 20 64 61 74 61 2e 0a 4f 6e 65 20 6d 6f 72 65 20 6c 69 6e 65 20 6f 66 20 74 65 73 74 20 64 61 74 61 2e

$ for c in `cat test_file.txt`; do printf "\x$c"; done;
This is text data.
One more line of test data.