Hex editor

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Hexplorer, an open-source hex editor for Microsoft Windows
Hexplorer, an open-source hex editor for Microsoft Windows

A hex editor (or binary file editor or byte editor) is a type of computer program that allows a user to manipulate binary (normally non-plain text) computer files. Hex editors that were designed to edit sector data from floppy or hard disks were sometimes called sector editors or disk editors.

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By using a hex editor, a user can see or edit the raw and exact contents of a file as opposed to the interpretation of the same content that other, higher level application software may associate with the file format. For example, this could be raw image data, in contrast to the way image editing software would interpret the same file.

In most hex editor applications the data of the computer file is represented as hexadecimal values grouped in two groups of 8 bytes and one group of 16 ASCII characters, nonprintable characters normally are represented by a dot "." in the ASCII part.

There are some hex editors capable of displaying the data in the byte code (all 256 characters). These were very common under MS-DOS operating system, today they are very rare, since most modern font files do not contain non-printable characters. An example of an editor capable of displaying all characters in byte code that works under Microsoft Windows is 1Fh binary/hex editor.

The standard Unix shell command used to display (though not edit) a file in hexadecimal and octal is od.

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