PHP Manual: Decodes a hexadecimally encoded binary string

string hex2bin ( string $data )

Decodes a hexadecimally encoded binary string.

Caution

This function does NOT convert a hexadecimal number to a binary number. This can be done using the base_convert function.

Returns the binary representation of the given data or FALSE on failure.

If the hexadecimal input string is of odd length or invalid hexadecimal string an E_WARNING level error is thrown.

Version	Description
5.5.1	A warning is thrown if the input string is invalid hexadecimal string.
5.4.4	A warning is thrown if the input string is of odd length. In PHP 5.4.0 the string was silently accepted, but the last byte was truncated.

Example #1 hex2bin example


<?php
$hex = hex2bin("6578616d706c65206865782064617461");
var_dump($hex);
?>

The above example will output something similar to:

string(16) "example hex data"

hex2bin