php - Convert hex to ascii characters

Question

Is it possible to represent a sequence of hex characters (0-9A-F) with a sequence of 0-9a-zA-Z characters, so the the result sequence is smaller and can be decoded?

For example:

$hex = '5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592';
echo $string = encode($hex); // someASCIIletters123
echo decode(string) == $hex; //true

Answer 1

I think you're looking for this:

function hex2str($hex) {
    $str = '';
    for($i=0;$i<strlen($hex);$i+=2) $str .= chr(hexdec(substr($hex,$i,2)));
    return $str;
}

(From http://www.linux-support.com/cms/php-convert-hex-strings-to-ascii-strings/) (Works like this javascript tool: http://www.dolcevie.com/js/converter.html)