Hex-Editor

Under a hex editor ( hex editor also ) refers to a computer program with which represent the bytes of any file as a sequence of hexadecimal digits and can be edited. If there is no edit possibility, one speaks of a hex viewer or hex viewer. Both versions are particularly useful for viewing and editing binary files.

General

With a hex editor all kinds of files can be viewed, one interpretation of the data by default does not occur. Image files, MP3 files, and executable files are represented as a sequence of bytes, before they are interpreted as colors, sounds or computer commands.

The representation of a hex editor can be quite confusing. Therefore, there is often the possibility of data interpreted and structured view and to choose between different interpretations and representations.

Benefits of hex editors

Usually require programs that correspond to data of a certain structure or a format; therefore, they can not do anything with the data from a corrupted structure. The ability of hex editors to edit data at the lowest level, allowing, for example:

• In their structure corrupted data to read and restore
• To analyze the structure of a file format
• To work areas that are usually not accessible or editable by the user, such as meta information in images or text documents or states of a character in game scores

Usual representation of a file with a hex editor

00000 48 61 6C 6C 6F 2C 20 64 69 65 73 20 69 73 74 20 Hello, this is 00010 65 69 6E 20 42 65 69 73 70 69 65 6C 54 65 2D 78 an example -Tex 00020 74 2E t. Hex editors are generally constructed as follows (note reference to the example shown above):

• On the far left, an offset is displayed. This indicates the number of previous bytes in hexadecimal notation. In the first line, the offset is 0, which corresponds to the beginning of the file; in the second row it is 1016, i.e., there are 1016 = 1610 bytes preceded it. Some hex editors display offset, cluster and sector numbers and decimal (the last two are for processing the data at the file system level important).
• In the middle of the bytes ( octets accurate ) are shown the file in hexadecimal, eg 4816 for the first byte in the first row.
• On the far right are finally the bytes of the current row as shown text (in a particular character set). In the example, the bytes are interpreted as the ASCII, the most common one -byte code ( the first byte 4816 is the letter H). This representation is only useful when it is in fact text in the data. For example, images are shown as a random sequence of characters, but sometimes patterns can be seen (especially in uncompressed images such as bitmaps ).

Disk editors

With some hex editors can not only files but also the underlying data blocks of data carriers (such as floppy disks or hard disks) to edit. Programs that offer this as a primary function, usually called Disk Editor or disk monitor, nearly always the function of the processing is given ( and not just the view).