ASCII To Binary And Binary To ASCII Conversion Tools?

Answer :

$ echo AB | perl -lpe '$_=unpack"B*"' 0100000101000010 $ echo 0100000101000010 | perl -lpe '$_=pack"B*",$_' AB 

• -e expression evaluate the given expression as perl code
• -p: sed mode. The expression is evaluated for each line of input, with the content of the line stored in the $_ variable and printed after the evaluation of the expression.
• -l: even more like sed: instead of the full line, only the content of the line (that is, without the line delimiter) is in $_ (and a newline is added back on output). So perl -lpe code works like sed code except that it's perl code as opposed to sed code.
• unpack "B*" works on the $_ variable by default and extracts its content as a bit string walking from the highest bit of the first byte to the lowest bit of the last byte.
• pack does the reverse of unpack. See perldoc -f pack for details.

With spaces:

$ echo AB | perl -lpe '$_=join " ", unpack"(B8)*"' 01000001 01000010 $ echo 01000001 01000010 | perl -lape '$_=pack"(B8)*",@F' AB 

(it assumes the input is in blocks of 8 bits (0-padded)).

With unpack "(B8)*", we extract 8 bits at a time, and we join the resulting strings with spaces with join " ".

You can use xxd to convert from ASCII and binary.

$ echo -n "A" | xxd -b 0000000: 01000001                                               A  $ echo -n "A" | xxd -b | awk '{print $2}' 01000001 

Converting bases

If you're looking to do just base conversions between Hex, Octal, & Dec I usually use the basic calculator command line tool (bc) to do such things. Note that bc is always very picky about the correct order of bases: you have to specify the resulting base (obase) first, then add your choice of ibase.

$ echo "obase=2; ibase=16; A" | bc 1010  $ echo "obase=16; ibase=2; 1010" | bc A 

Using bc and bash:

#!/bin/bash  chrbin() {         echo $(printf \\$(echo "ibase=2; obase=8; $1" | bc)) }  ordbin() {   a=$(printf '%d' "'$1")   echo "obase=2; $a" | bc }  ascii2bin() {     echo -n $* | while IFS= read -r -n1 char     do         ordbin $char | tr -d '\n'         echo -n " "     done }  bin2ascii() {     for bin in $*     do         chrbin $bin | tr -d '\n'     done } ascii2bin "This is a binary message" bin2ascii 01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101101 01100101 01110011 01110011 01100001 01100111 01100101