Hex Viewer Programs

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Five Free Hex Viewers

An Overview

Abstract

Hex viewers have become an integral part of computer operation not only for the program or the software companies , but also for the average users who are now taking charge of the maintenance of their computers , by manipulating binary (normally non-plain text ) computer s and this is where the scope of hex editors are rising day by day By using a hex editor , a user can see or edit the raw and exact contents of a [banner_entry_middle]

as opposed to the interpretation of the same content that other , higher level application software may associate with the format e .g , this could be raw image data , in contrast to the way image editing software would interpret the same . Although some Hex Editors can even display a text the same way Text Editors do (and all of them should at least show the ASCII text characters on part of the screen , Hex Editors excel at two things that are impossible for most text editing programs

Revealing each byte that makes up a (any kind of including executable programs

Saving the with only the changes that are made unlike many old Text Editors , which always add a couple extra bytes at the end of each br

In most of the hex application , the data of the computer s is represented as hexadecimal values grouped in two groups of 8 bytes and one group of 16 ASCII characters , nonprintable characters normally are represented by a dot ” in the ASCII part . Utmost care and caution needed to handle Hex viewers as it might mislead the novice user to the loss of . Also , most Text Editors will “drastically change or even truncate binary s (chop off a large portion at the end of the copied when loading it into the editor , so one should never use a Text Editor to make changes to a unless one knows for sure that it ‘s a plain text type ” That calls for the habit of always keeping a copy of any that a user needs to open with a Hex Editor . Because , even if a single byte gets changed by accident , the whole program might be impossible to run . This is completely different exercise from changing a bye in a program or binary data like MS Word

To meet the specific need of the user there are many hex editors have come in the market , which are available in three segments like freeware shareware and direct purchase . This has happened due to various market policies adopted by various software companies . This research confines itself in the freeware segment and evaluates five free hex viewers while using a selection criteria of covering the gamut of its scope , like whether one has a GUI interface , or another could read NTFS or if there is at least one viewer for FAT32 , or is there any such viewer… [banner_entry_footer]