I’ve read several posts in various places of people going through and copying the hex out of the terminals by hand and using an ASCII table to manually look them up. They’re much longer in TTP2 than they were in TTP1, and that’s painful just to think about. So I thought I’d outline an easy process for people who haven’t thought of it yet.
How to Decode Hex
How-To
Using Google Translate app on your phone, set it for English -> English and use the camera input feature. It will automatically make the hex selectable from your picture, and from there you can easily copy and paste it into a hex to ASCII lookup site.
A less reliable option is to use the camera text input option if you have an iPhone. Go to a hex to ASCII website and tap the input box. Next to “paste” there’s an icon that looks like some lines of text with a selection box around it. Use that, hold the phone steady and tap on the paragraph you want to grab, and it will automatically paste it into the input box. This method only works if the hex is in its own paragraph. Otherwise you’ll have to use Google Translate app.
I know this isn’t anything groundbreaking, but hopefully it saves some people a lot of time.
Alternative Ways
Another alternative if phone use isn’t do-able or desirable for anyone:
- Use Snipping Tool (Windows) or take a screenshot.
- Upload image of target Hexadecimal to an online OCR tool, either export to a .txt file or have it dump the raw text.
- Copy-paste the OCR’d Hexadecimal into one of the many many Hex -> ASCII converters online.
More of a hassle this way compared to OP’s, potential benefit is being able to easily save the ‘translated’ text straight to your PC for later reference if you want/need it.
There’s a free open source screenshot utility called ShareX which has automation features built in, including OCR. The resulting text will then be in your clipboard, just need to run it through a hex>ascii converter after that. That will make the process almost hassle-free, could even automate that last step but you’d have to be a bit tech savvy to do that.
A bit of additional advice
The converters don’t know where the first hex character is, and sometimes fail at the conversion because of this. When this happens (result is partially or completely unreadable) look for the nearest “20” in the hex string after the point where the translation fails. Then add a 0 after the “20” and run the conversion again.
For example, if the result is something like “The son of man#(&@(&!@$*(&)%”, look at the hex string and estimate where the translation failed. Every letter is 2 characters in hex so you need to take the length of “The son of man” (14 characters in text) times two (= 28 characters in hex) to find the breaking point in the translation. Find the first “20” in the hex string after that point, then change it into 200. After that the translation will usually succeed, minus that one word where the corruption is.
It usually also works to manually take the hex strings out of the text and convert those separately, which is a bit easier, but I believe that might not always work as sometimes there are corruptions in the hex strings itself.
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