Aayushya’s Substack
Hex encoding is a widely used technique in the software industry for representing binary data in a human-readable format. It converts each byte of binary data into a two-character hexadecimal representation. Some of the use-cases of hex encoding are:
Data Storage and network Transmission: Hex encoding is essential for storing or sending binary data in formats like json, xml etc, which can't directly handle binary.
Checksums and Hash Digests: Hex encoding is commonly used to represent checksums and hash digests. Checksums are used to verify the integrity of data, ensuring that it has not been corrupted during storage or transmission. Hash digests, such as SHA-256 or MD5, are often used for data integrity checks, password storage, and digital signatures. By hex encoding checksums and hash digests, they can be easily compared, stored, and communicated as human-readable strings.
For this blog, I will take point 2 as an example to show various approaches as I recently contributed to optimising such a method in supabase edge-runtime where this hex encoding function is used to prepare cache keys, doing checksum on files etc. Here is the pull request link if you like to explore the changes there.
