When working in PHP there are times when I want to see what a string is in HEX – a lot of times there are invisible characters that or non-printing strings that can throw your program or script for a loop.
If you save the string to a text file, you can use a hex editor utility, like `hexdump` to take a look at the hex codes of the ASCII characters:
$ echo abcd > test.txt
$ hexdump test.txt
0000000 61 62 63 64 0a
0000005
$
Now for the PHP version:
header(‘Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8’);
$ascii = ‘abcd’;
$hex = unpack(‘H*’,$ascii);
// you can print out the hex result of the ascii conversion:
print_r($hex);
# Array
# (
# [1] => 61626364
# )
// or for a nicer display you can add spaces between every two characters
// and wrap the column every 6 characters (change to fit your needs)
echo wordwrap(implode(‘ ‘, str_split($hex[1], 2)), 6);
# 61 62
# 63 64
