Question
I am playing with the unix hexdump utility. My input file is UTF-8 encoded, containing a single character ñ
, which is C3 B1
in hexadecimal UTF-8.
hexdump test.txt
0000000 b1c3
0000002
Huh? This shows B1 C3
- the inverse of what I expected! Can someone explain?
For getting the expected output I do:
hexdump -C test.txt
00000000 c3 b1 |..|
00000002
I was thinking I understand encoding systems..
Solution
This is because hexdump defaults to using 16-bit words and you are running on a little-endian architecture. The byte sequence b1 c3
is thus interpreted as the hex word c3b1
. The -C
option forces hexdump to work with bytes instead of words.
OTHER TIPS
I found two ways to avoid that:
hexdump -C file
or
od -tx1 < file
I think it is stupid that hexdump decided that files are usually 16bit word little endian. Very confusing IMO.
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