Text code decoding

Question

Hello. I am an English/Spanish Spanish/English translator. I have been given a job where I have to translate Spanish text messages sent from cell phones. Some of them are in code. I assume each set of figures represents a letter. Is there any website where I can find information on how to decipher the code?

For instance, the first message says:

‘0x69 ox61 0x6e 0x70 0x72 0x2e 0x6e 0x65 0x74 0x2f 0x3f 0x64 0x34 0x39 0x31 0x66 0x30 0x37 0x38 0x35 0x35 0x32 0x39 0x62 0x36 0x31 0x31 0x00

Thank you for any help you provide.

Diana

Answer 1

Well it looks like hex values, and if it's just ASCII text in hex, you can use a converter to see what the message is.

http://www.dolcevie.com/js/converter.html

Answer 2

It's a hex-encoded URL, according to this translator:

ianpr.net/?d491f0785529b611

Answer 3

That looks like Ascii code to me.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII - look at the hex coding. For example 0x69 would be an i.

Answer 4

Something like 'ianpr.net/?d491f0785529b611\x00'

:)

Decoding in Python:

a = "0x69 0x61 0x6e 0x70 0x72 0x2e 0x6e 0x65 0x74 0x2f 0x3f 0x64 0x34 0x39 0x31 0x66 0x30 0x37 0x38 0x35 0x35 0x32 0x39 0x62 0x36 0x31 0x31 0x00"
b = ""
for  i in a.split():
  b = b + chr(int(i[2]+i[3], 16))
print b 

Answer 5

Here's a Hex-to-ASCII decoder that can take your input format without modification (paste into the "0x... notation" box and press Convert).

BTW, in order to help you understand: those "sets of figures" each represent a byte, written as a hexadecimal number (base 16). The 0x prefix is how hexadecimal numbers are written in the C programming language (and many others). So now you have a series of bytes. Those then need to be interpreted as characters, through a set of rules known as "character encoding". This has to happen everywhere computers display text. Unfortunately, there are many different incompatible character encodings. Most of them agree on how to interpret the first 128 values a byte can take (the US-ASCII encoding). But if you deal with Spanish text, you'll quickly encounter characters that are not representable in ASCII. Then it becomes important to choose the correct encoding; I doubt there is an online tool for converting Hex notation that allows you to choose the encoding.

Answer 6

Careful, if it is text messages then it is GSM-7, not ascii