Hex String to Byte Array in C

Question

Is there a standard C function that can convert from hex string to bye array? I do not want to write my own function if there is an already existing standard way.

Answer 1

No. But it's relatively trivial to achieve using sscanf in a loop.

Answer 2

As far as I know, there's no standard function to do so, but it's simple to achieve in the following manner:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    const char hexstring[] = "deadbeef10203040b00b1e50", *pos = hexstring;
    unsigned char val[12];
    size_t count = 0;

     /* WARNING: no sanitization or error-checking whatsoever */
    for(count = 0; count < sizeof(val)/sizeof(val[0]); count++) {
        sscanf(pos, "%2hhx", &val[count]);
        pos += 2 * sizeof(char);
    }

    printf("0x");
    for(count = 0; count < sizeof(val)/sizeof(val[0]); count++)
        printf("%02x", val[count]);
    printf("\n");

    return(0);
}

Hope this helps.

Edit

As Al pointed out, in case of an odd number of hex digits in the string, you have to make sure you prefix it with a starting 0. For example, the string "f00f5" will be evaluated as {0xf0, 0x0f, 0x05} erroneously by the above example, instead of the proper {0x0f, 0x00, 0xf5}.

Answer 3

char *hexstring = "deadbeef10203040b00b1e50", *pos = hexstring;
unsigned char val[12];
while( *pos )
{
  if( !((pos-hexstring)&1) )
    sscanf(pos,"%02x",&val[(pos-hexstring)>>1]);
  ++pos;
}

sizeof(val)/sizeof(val[0]) is redundant!