Converting A String To Hexadecimal In Java

Question

Here's a short way to convert it to hex:

public String toHex(String arg) {
    return String.format("%040x", new BigInteger(1, arg.getBytes(/*YOUR_CHARSET?*/)));
}

To ensure that the hex is always 40 characters long, the BigInteger has to be positive:

public String toHex(String arg) {
  return String.format("%x", new BigInteger(1, arg.getBytes(/*YOUR_CHARSET?*/)));
}

import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Hex;
...

String hexString = Hex.encodeHexString(myString.getBytes(/* charset */));

http://commons.apache.org/codec/apidocs/org/apache/commons/codec/binary/Hex.html

The numbers that you encode into hexadecimal must represent some encoding of the characters, such as UTF-8. So first convert the String to a byte[] representing the string in that encoding, then convert each byte to hexadecimal.

public static String hexadecimal(String input, String charsetName) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
    if (input == null) throw new NullPointerException();
    return asHex(input.getBytes(charsetName));
}

private static final char[] HEX_CHARS = "0123456789abcdef".toCharArray();

public static String asHex(byte[] buf)
{
    char[] chars = new char[2 * buf.length];
    for (int i = 0; i < buf.length; ++i)
    {
        chars[2 * i] = HEX_CHARS[(buf[i] & 0xF0) >>> 4];
        chars[2 * i + 1] = HEX_CHARS[buf[i] & 0x0F];
    }
    return new String(chars);
}

Use DatatypeConverter.printHexBinary():

public static String toHexadecimal(String text) throws UnsupportedEncodingException
{
    byte[] myBytes = text.getBytes("UTF-8");

    return DatatypeConverter.printHexBinary(myBytes);
}

Example usage:

System.out.println(toHexadecimal("Hello StackOverflow"));

Prints:

48656C6C6F20537461636B4F766572666C6F77

Note: This causes a little extra trouble with Java 9 and newer since the API is not included by default. For reference e.g. see this GitHub issue.

Here an other solution

public static String toHexString(byte[] ba) {
    StringBuilder str = new StringBuilder();
    for(int i = 0; i < ba.length; i++)
        str.append(String.format("%x", ba[i]));
    return str.toString();
}

public static String fromHexString(String hex) {
    StringBuilder str = new StringBuilder();
    for (int i = 0; i < hex.length(); i+=2) {
        str.append((char) Integer.parseInt(hex.substring(i, i + 2), 16));
    }
    return str.toString();
}