How store hexadecimal strings in a Byte array? [duplicate]

Question

I am looking for a way to convert a long string (from a dump), that represents hex values into a byte array.

I couldn't have phrased it better than the person that posted the same question here.

But to keep it original, I'll phrase it my own way: suppose I have a string "00A0BF" that I would like interpreted as the

byte[] {0x00,0xA0,0xBf}

what should I do?

I am a Java novice and ended up using BigInteger and watching out for leading hex zeros. But I think it is ugly and I am sure I am missing something simple.

Answer 1

Update (2021) - Java 17 now includes java.util.HexFormat (only took 25 years):

HexFormat.of().parseHex(s)

---

For older versions of Java:

Here's a solution that I think is better than any posted so far:

/* s must be an even-length string. */
public static byte[] hexStringToByteArray(String s) {
    int len = s.length();
    byte[] data = new byte[len / 2];
    for (int i = 0; i < len; i += 2) {
        data[i / 2] = (byte) ((Character.digit(s.charAt(i), 16) << 4)
                             + Character.digit(s.charAt(i+1), 16));
    }
    return data;
}

Reasons why it is an improvement:

• Safe with leading zeros (unlike BigInteger) and with negative byte values (unlike Byte.parseByte)

• Doesn't convert the String into a char[], or create StringBuilder and String objects for every single byte.

• No library dependencies that may not be available

Feel free to add argument checking via assert or exceptions if the argument is not known to be safe.

Answer 2

One-liners:

import javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter;

public static String toHexString(byte[] array) {
    return DatatypeConverter.printHexBinary(array);
}

public static byte[] toByteArray(String s) {
    return DatatypeConverter.parseHexBinary(s);
}

Warnings:

• in Java 9 Jigsaw this is no longer part of the (default) java.se root set so it will result in a ClassNotFoundException unless you specify --add-modules java.se.ee (thanks to @eckes)
• Not available on Android (thanks to Fabian for noting that), but you can just take the source code if your system lacks javax.xml for some reason. Thanks to @Bert Regelink for extracting the source.