by L. Spiro » Mon Nov 08, 2010 6:05 pm
I am assuming you are using MHS, or any existing hex editor.
On the right side are ASCII characters.
On the left are the actual bytes.
A byte is a number from 0 to 255. Or 0x00 to 0xFF represented in hex.
Of course computers work by numbers. Everything is a number to a computer. That is why AI is impossible.
That means letters, such as ABCDEFG, are all numbers to the computer.
A is number 65, or if represented in hex, 0x41.
If you see a 41 on the left side, you will see A on the right side in the corresponding position.
This happens because “A” may be just a number to the computer, but to give it meaning to a human it has to translate that number to some graphical form.
The computer takes number 65 and translates it to the screen as “A” so that humans don’t have to learn to think of everything as just numbers.
The same process for translating numbers to human-made characters can be done on every number from 0 to 255 (almost).
This is very simple. The numbers on the left have been translated to human-readable characters on the right.
The characters don’t have to make sense. If the numbers (bytes) were put into an order that makes sense, you could translate each byte and end up with a normal sentence.
What you have is a bunch of bytes that are in a certain order, but not an order that is meant to be a human-readable sentence.
With that being the case, you should’t be trying to read the characters. You should be looking at the bytes.
MHS provides options for displaying the characters as forms other than just ASCII characters.
L. Spiro
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