Question

I’m trying to convert a text string to hexadecimal in php (which sounds trivial enough) but all the conversions I have tried output incorrect data.

The string I need to convert is;
RTP1 •. • A ¥;¥9ÈKJ| %¯ : E~WF 3HxI#Y¥

The correct result is;
525450310120209501022e2095204120030503040ba53b03040ba539c84b041f4a7c1120202025af032020203a20457e0357462033487849230459a52020202020

But I consistently get;
52545031012020e280a201022e20e280a2204120030503040bc2a53b03040bc2a539c3884b041f4a7c1120202025c2af032020203a20457e0357462033487849230459c2a52020202020

The online calculator at http://www.swingnote.com/tools/texttohex.php works on this perfectly – I have emailed the author to request the php source code but have had no answer.

I’ve tried the following functions without success;

bin2hex($data);

function strToHex($string)
{
    $hex='';
    for ($i=0; $i < strlen($string); $i++)
    {
        $hex .= dechex(ord($string[$i]));
    }
    return $hex;
}

for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($string); $i++) {
    echo dechex(ord($string[$i]));
}

and a few others I can no longer find… I’m really at a loss with this so any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
Matthew

Answer 1

The input string appears to contain utf-8 encoded characters (I say this based on the output). Try converting these characters back into an ASCII/ISO-8859-1 alike format.

$indat = utf8_decode("...");
$hexdata = bin2hex($indat);