Converting from hexadecimal to binary in Igor 8

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Fri, 09/17/2021 - 02:04 pm

I am parsing a string of data from an instrument that contains values in hex, but I need to convert them to binary in order to interpret them in a useful way (each bit corresponds to the state of a channel from the instrument).

From what I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a native function in Igor to convert from binary to hex or back. I know that Igor can interpret hex as a decimal value (ie 0xFF = 255), and I am aware that there are some functions that read binary data (VDTReadBinary2()), but I couldn't find a simple translator for hex -> binary.

Is such a function available, or should I try implementing one myself?

Thanks so much in advance for any input!

The sscanf operation will do it. Here is a simple example:

Function test()
    Variable var
    sscanf "0xff34", "%x", var
    print var
end
•test()
  65332

The receiving variable must be a variable, so if you want the result in a wave you must assign it after the call to sscanf.

September 17, 2021 at 03:36 pm - Permalink

I suggest you execute the following command to bring up the related help topic:

DisplayHelpTopic "Using Bitwise Operators"

You can do what john suggested to get the hex value into a numeric variable. Then you can test each of the bits to get the state of the channel.

If you really need this in a binary representation (eg. "01011010101010") then you can use printf with the %b conversion character.

September 17, 2021 at 04:47 pm - Permalink

Thank you, these comments were very helpful!

I ended up using aclight's second suggestion, which was using sscanf suggested by John and then using sprintf with the %b character:

sscanf hex_value, "%x", int_value
sprintf binary_value, "%b\r", int_value

Thanks again for your help!

October 13, 2021 at 08:50 am - Permalink