How do I convert a string the looks like a hex number to an actual hex number in php?

Question

Hey everyone,

I have a string that looks like this "7a" and I want to convert it to the hex number 7A. I have tried using pack and unpack but that is giving me the hex representation for each individual character. I'm out of ideas and don't know where to go from here.

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Probably the simplest way to store that as an integer is hexdec()

$num = hexdec( '7A' );

Answer 2

Well a number is a number, it does not depend on the representation. You can get the actual value using intval():

$number = intval('7a', 16); 

To convert the number back to a hexadecimal string you can use dechex().