Hew

Hew is a command line tool for converting binary data to and from hexadecimal. This is a task I occasionally need to perform, and I wanted a simple tool which covered the common cases so I don't have to write this code again and again.

The hexadecimal data given will be read regardless of whitespace or separator characters to attempt to support the widest range of use cases. The hexadecimal output is configurable to allow a separator, an optional '0x' prefix, hex words split into groups, and multiple rows of a given number of bytes of data.

Usage

Hew has two distinct modes- bin and hex- and must be provided a mode on the command line. In bin mode, a binary file is created, and in hex mode a text file containing hexadecimal numbers is created.

hew 0.2
Noah Ryan
Binary to Hex, Hex to Binary Converter

USAGE:
    hew [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] --input <FILE> --output <OUTFILE>

FLAGS:
    -l, --lowercase    Print hex in lowercase (default is UPPERCASE)
    -p, --prefix       Print hex with the '0x' prefix before each word, if printing with separated words
    -h, --help         Prints help information
    -V, --version      Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -i, --input <FILE>              Input file to convert
    -m, --mode <MODE>               The target format, either 'hex' or 'bin
    -o, --output <OUTFILE>          Output file
    -r, --row-width <ROWWIDTH>      Row length in decoded bytes when decoding binary into hex
    -s, --sep <SEPARATOR>           String separator between words [default:  ]
    -w, --word-width <WORDWIDTH>    Number of bytes to decode between separators on a line. Defaults to no separators.

Encoding

Given the following file of hexadecimal numbers in a file called numbers.hex:

0123456789ABCDEF

run the following command to encode them to binary:

hew -i numbers.hex -o numbers.bin -m bin

To get the file (as viewed with xxd):

00000000: 0123 4567 89ab cdef                      .#Eg....

Encoding has no flags to control the process- hex numbers are taken from a file, skipping unrelated characters like whitespaces. One thing to be careful of is that hew will attempt to encode any characters that look like hex, so the word 'Become" will be encoded as 0xBECE (the non-hex characters are ignored). Its better to have only whitespace, punctuation, and '0x' characters in the file along with your hex data.

Another example of a file that hew will accept is:

0x0123 0x4567
0x89AB
0xCDEF

Where hew will notice the '0x' characters together and ignore them.

Decoding

When decoding binary data into hex digits, hew provides a number of options.

Using the example binary file (as viewed by xxd):

00000000: 0123 4567 89ab cdef                      .#Eg....

These options control whether the result is a single sequence of characters:

hew -i numbers.bin -o numbers.txt -m hex

resulting in:

0123456789ABCDEF

This can be modified to, say, print 2 bytes as a word, prefixed by 0x, with 4 bytes per line.

hew -i numbers.bin -o numbers.txt -m hex -p -w 2 -r 4

resulting in:

0X0123 0X4567
0X89AB 0XCDEF

Another example would be each byte separated by a comma, no prefix, all on one line:

hew -i numbers.bin -o numbers.txt -m hex -w 1 -s ", "

01, 23, 45, 67, 89, AB, CD, EF

Installation

Hew can be installed through 'cargo' with:

cargo install hew

or it can be installed by retrieving binaries from https://github/nsmryan/hew/releases.

License

Hew is licensed under either the MIT License or the APACHE 2.0 License, whichever you prefer.