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I somewhat routinely need to convert an arbitrarily long string to hex, usually encoded as ascii or unicode.

Is there a way to quickly and easily do this using vanilla Emacs? If not, is there a go to package that can do this?

There was a prior question about converting a single character to its hex value, but this question is interested in converting arbitrarily long strings to hex.

Examples ("input string" output hex):

  • "bird" 62697264
  • "What are we going to do tomorrow night? The same thing we do every night Pinky, try to take over the world!" 576861742061726520776520676f696e6720746f20646f20746f6d6f72726f77206e696768743f205468652073616d65207468696e6720776520646f206576657279206e696768742050696e6b792c2074727920746f2074616b65206f7665722074686520776f726c6421
  • "おはようございます"
    • (utf8) e3818ae381afe38288e38186e38194e38196e38184e381bee38199
    • (utf16 be) 304a306f30883046305430563044307e3059
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  • 2
    For clarity, please give examples of input and desired output(s).
    – Phil Hudson
    Jun 3, 2022 at 8:36
  • @PhilHudson Good idea, added!
    – holocronweaver
    Jun 3, 2022 at 17:52

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
5 
(defun hexify-string (strg)
  (mapconcat (lambda (c) (format "%x" c)) strg ""))
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  • Great, thanks. Was sure there will be an elegant solution. Will delete my answer.
    – Andreas Röhler
    Jun 3, 2022 at 11:04
  • I appreciate the kind words and collaborative spirit. I did consider using (apply-partially #'format "%x"), which I think would be more elegant, but it's a couple of characters longer than (lambda (c) (format "%x" c)) -- unless you use -partial from dash.el instead, which is what I would usually do in practice.
    – Phil Hudson
    Jun 3, 2022 at 11:08
  • A simple custom solution! I guess to add other encodings you would have to add another parameter and map it to the appropriate format string from gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/… So for UTF8 the string would be "%o"? That didn't seem to work, I still got the utf16 be encoding.
    – holocronweaver
    Jun 3, 2022 at 23:37

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