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BinHex, originally short for "binary-to-hexadecimal", is a binary-to-text encoding system which was used on the classic Mac OS for sending binary files over email.BinHexed files take up more space than the original files, but avoid data corruption by software that is not 8-bit clean.
A binary-to-text encoding is encoding of data in plain text. More precisely, it is an encoding of binary data in a sequence of printable characters . These encodings are necessary for transmission of data when the communication channel does not allow binary data (such as email or NNTP ) or is not 8-bit clean .
Hexadecimal (also known as base-16 or simply hex) is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of sixteen. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using ten symbols, hexadecimal uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols "0"–"9" to represent values 0 to 9 and "A"–"F" to represent values from ten to fifteen.
Intel hexadecimal object file format, Intel hex format or Intellec Hex is a file format that conveys binary information in ASCII text form, [10] making it possible to store on non-binary media such as paper tape, punch cards, etc., to display on text terminals or be printed on line-oriented printers. [11]
Computer engineers often need to write out binary quantities, but in practice writing out a binary number such as 1001001101010001 is tedious and prone to errors. Therefore, binary quantities are written in a base-8, or "octal", or, much more commonly, a base-16, "hexadecimal" (hex), number format. In the decimal system, there are 10 digits, 0 ...
This scheme can also be referred to as Simple Binary-Coded Decimal (SBCD) or BCD 8421, and is the most common encoding. [12] Others include the so-called "4221" and "7421" encoding – named after the weighting used for the bits – and "Excess-3". [13]
Least significant bit first means that the least significant bit will arrive first: hence e.g. the same hexadecimal number 0x12, again 00010010 in binary representation, will arrive as the (reversed) sequence 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0.
Binary may be converted to and from hexadecimal more easily. This is because the radix of the hexadecimal system (16) is a power of the radix of the binary system (2). More specifically, 16 = 2 4, so it takes four digits of binary to represent one digit of hexadecimal, as shown in the adjacent table.