Binary editors – Useful tools

HxD - Binary editorAt some time or other you are going to need a binary editor, to let you look in files and see what they contain.

One I can recommend is HxD which is shown here.

This not only lets you look at the contents of a binary file (in hex and decoded as text)  but you can change them.

It also includes file tools so you can split files, combine them (i.e. append) and securely wipe them. And very handy, the ability to compare two binary files, shown below.

It also lets you export binary files as data  for any of these languages (Pascal,C C#, Java, VisualBasic.net, HTML, rich text and some other formats). Here’s what the top file looks like exported into C.

/* D:\development\pivot\pivot\Debug\l.key (11/05/2020 12:03:32)
StartOffset(h): 00000000, EndOffset(h): 0000003F, Length(h): 00000040 */

unsigned char rawData[64] = {
0x18, 0x3C, 0x2B, 0x11, 0x24, 0x1E, 0x17, 0x26, 0x1C, 0x15, 0x04, 0x19,
0x23, 0x28, 0x08, 0x07, 0x35, 0x0F, 0x34, 0x37, 0x32, 0x05, 0x20, 0x27,
0x3E, 0x0A, 0x3B, 0x2E, 0x1F, 0x29, 0x21, 0x25, 0x2F, 0x14, 0x2D, 0x1A,
0x1D, 0x0C, 0x33, 0x01, 0x39, 0x2A, 0x1B, 0x00, 0x36, 0x06, 0x22, 0x31,
0x38, 0x3A, 0x3D, 0x2C, 0x16, 0x0D, 0x03, 0x00, 0x09, 0x12, 0x13, 0x02,
0x0B, 0x0E, 0x30, 0x10
};

In truth there are many binary file editors. You can find them under hex editors as well. But this is a particularly nice one; recommended.