Hexbinary

Hexbinary is not a formal standard term on its own, but it is commonly used to describe the representation of binary data as hexadecimal text. In many contexts it refers to a human-readable or text-based encoding of binary data, and in some cases it points to a specific XML Schema datatype named hexBinary, which encodes binary data as hexadecimal digits.

In hexBinary, each byte of binary data is represented by two hexadecimal digits, using the base-16 alphabet 0-9 and A-F (case-insensitive). The canonical form consists of an even number of digits with no separators, though human-readable dumps often insert spaces or colons to improve readability. This encoding is compact for a text representation and is widely used for display, logging, and data interchange where binary must be conveyed in text.

Common uses and utilities include debugging and data inspection, memory or network dump viewing, and cross-language data exchanges where binary must be embedded in textual formats. Many programming languages provide standard library functions to convert between binary data and hex strings, and numerous tools produce or parse hex representations in debugging and analysis workflows.

Relation to formal standards: hexBinary is a defined datatype in XML Schema that encodes binary data as hexadecimal digits, reinforcing the usage of hex representations in data exchange. The term “hexadecimal encoding” or “base16” is often used interchangeably in this context. It is important to distinguish this textual encoding from numeric literals in code (for example, 0x-prefixed values) which denote numbers rather than serialized binary data.

Example: a 4-byte sequence 0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF is written as DEADBEEF in hexbinary (or DE AD BE EF when formatted for readability).