how to convert bin file contents to hex in c

There is nothing 'lower level' about it, and you certainly won't get any optimized performance. I want it to be as low level as possible for optimal performance. Any good text editor (at least, one designed for programmers), can open and display the contents of a file using either representation (or ASCII, or decimal). It's exactly the same information either way. Code in binary files can be represented in either hex or binary format. There's a reason that C build systems output PE files by default: that's the only type of file that's going to be of any use to you.Īnd like user1167662 says in his comment, there is nothing magical about hex code. It's lacking the magic PE header that makes it executable. You won't be able to execute the file because it's not in the correct, recognized format. It just contains a sequence of binary bits in no particular format. You could have taken some other binary file (like an image) and renamed it to have a '.bin' extension.

So a PE file is a binary ('.bin') file, but an unknown binary file with a '.bin' extension is not necessarily a PE file. This is the standard form of binary file used on Windows operating systems, both for executables and DLLs. The '.exe' file extension (at least on Windows, which I'll assume since you've added a Visual Studio-related tag) implies a binary file with a special format-a Portable Executable, or PE for short. I presume you won't be satisfied with that, so I'll elaborate a little further. So you can create a '.bin' file by renaming the '.exe' file that your linker generates to '.bin'. The extension generally just indicates a binary file, but all files are binary. There is nothing magic about a '.bin' file.

How to convert bin file contents to hex in c