Which encoding uses the \x (backslash x) prefix?

encoding internationalization
Alex Angas picture Alex Angas · May 20, 2009 · Viewed 45k times · Source

I'm attempting to decode text which is prefixing certain 'special characters' with \x. I've worked out the following mappings by hand:

\x28   (
\x29   )
\x3a   :

e.g. 12\x3a39\x3a03 AM

Does anyone recognise what this encoding is?

Answer

pts picture pts · May 20, 2009

It's ASCII. All occurrences of the four characters \xST are converted to 1 character, whose ASCII code is ST (in hexadecimal), where S and T are any of 0123456789abcdefABCDEF.

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