Converting a hex string to a byte array

This ought to work:

int char2int(char input)
{
  if(input >= '0' && input <= '9')
    return input - '0';
  if(input >= 'A' && input <= 'F')
    return input - 'A' + 10;
  if(input >= 'a' && input <= 'f')
    return input - 'a' + 10;
  throw std::invalid_argument("Invalid input string");
}

// This function assumes src to be a zero terminated sanitized string with
// an even number of [0-9a-f] characters, and target to be sufficiently large
void hex2bin(const char* src, char* target)
{
  while(*src && src[1])
  {
    *(target++) = char2int(*src)*16 + char2int(src[1]);
    src += 2;
  }
}

Depending on your specific platform there's probably also a standard implementation though.

This implementation uses the built-in strtol function to handle the actual conversion from text to bytes, but will work for any even-length hex string.

std::vector<char> HexToBytes(const std::string& hex) {
  std::vector<char> bytes;

  for (unsigned int i = 0; i < hex.length(); i += 2) {
    std::string byteString = hex.substr(i, 2);
    char byte = (char) strtol(byteString.c_str(), NULL, 16);
    bytes.push_back(byte);
  }

  return bytes;
}

So for fun, I was curious if I could do this kind of conversion at compile-time. It doesn't have a lot of error checking and was done in VS2015, which doesn't support C++14 constexpr functions yet (thus how HexCharToInt looks). It takes a c-string array, converts pairs of characters into a single byte and expands those bytes into a uniform initialization list used to initialize the T type provided as a template parameter. T could be replaced with something like std::array to automatically return an array.

#include <cstdint>
#include <initializer_list>
#include <stdexcept>
#include <utility>

/* Quick and dirty conversion from a single character to its hex equivelent */
constexpr std::uint8_t HexCharToInt(char Input)
{
    return
    ((Input >= 'a') && (Input <= 'f'))
    ? (Input - 87)
    : ((Input >= 'A') && (Input <= 'F'))
    ? (Input - 55)
    : ((Input >= '0') && (Input <= '9'))
    ? (Input - 48)
    : throw std::exception{};
}

/* Position the characters into the appropriate nibble */
constexpr std::uint8_t HexChar(char High, char Low)
{
    return (HexCharToInt(High) << 4) | (HexCharToInt(Low));
}

/* Adapter that performs sets of 2 characters into a single byte and combine the results into a uniform initialization list used to initialize T */
template <typename T, std::size_t Length, std::size_t ... Index>
constexpr T HexString(const char (&Input)[Length], const std::index_sequence<Index...>&)
{
    return T{HexChar(Input[(Index * 2)], Input[((Index * 2) + 1)])...};
}

/* Entry function */
template <typename T, std::size_t Length>
constexpr T HexString(const char (&Input)[Length])
{
    return HexString<T>(Input, std::make_index_sequence<(Length / 2)>{});
}

constexpr auto Y = KS::Utility::HexString<std::array<std::uint8_t, 3>>("ABCDEF");

You can use boost:

#include <boost/algorithm/hex.hpp>

char bytes[60] = {0}; 
std::string hash = boost::algorithm::unhex(std::string("313233343536373839")); 
std::copy(hash.begin(), hash.end(), bytes);

You said "variable length." Just how variable do you mean?

For hex strings that fit into an unsigned long I have always liked the C function strtoul. To make it convert hex pass 16 as the radix value.

Code might look like:

#include <cstdlib>
std::string str = "01a1";
unsigned long val = strtoul(str.c_str(), 0, 16);

Converting a hex string to a byte array

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