a2bhex

A2BHEX is a lightweight encoding utility and library that provides bidirectional conversion between ASCII text, binary data, and hexadecimal representations. The project aims for simplicity, small footprint, and portability, making it suitable for both embedded systems and development workflows.

Core functionality includes encoding ASCII to hexadecimal and decoding hexadecimal back to ASCII, with optional support for binary input and output. It offers streaming processing to handle large data sets, configurable endianness, and padding options to ensure consistent output. The tool can emit or accept standard text, hex literals with or without prefixes, and can operate on files or standard input.

Implementation and availability are oriented toward cross-platform use. A2BHEX is commonly implemented as a portable C library accompanied by a minimal command-line interface, and it may include bindings or wrappers for popular programming languages. The project is typically released under an open-source license, encouraging transparency, community contributions, and independent verification of behavior, including error handling for malformed input and clear reporting of invalid data.

Usage and applications center on data debugging, educational demonstrations of encoding concepts, and lightweight data serialization tasks. In practice, users encode ASCII data to hex for inspection or transmission, and decode hex back to ASCII for readability. The tool is valued for deterministic results, straightforward syntax, and predictable handling of edge cases such as non-printable characters or irregular input lengths.

See also: ASCII, hexadecimal notation, binary data, data encoding and decoding.