Question

How to determine byte location of a string of text

Asked by: WestonGroup

How do I determine the the 1st byte and 12th byte is of this string?

I am a byte!

49 20 61 6D 20 61 20 62-79 74 65 21   <---this is the hex values of the above string

would the 1st byte simply be the "I"  hex value 49  and the 12th "!"  hex value 21 or is there some other way of figuring this out?

This question is in progress. Our experts are working on an answer right now.
Sign up for immediate access to the solution once it becomes available.

Subscribe now for full access to Experts Exchange and get

Instant Access to this Solution

  • Plus...
  • 30 Day FREE access, no risk, no obligation
  • Collaborate with the world's top tech experts
  • Unlimited access to our exclusive solution database
  • Never be left without tech help again

Subscribe Now

Asked On
2009-05-22 at 05:18:06ID24430766
Topic

Digital Forensics

Participating Experts
4
Points
500
Comments
5

Trusted by hundreds of thousands everyday for fast, accurate and reliable tech support.

  • "The time we save is the biggest benefit of Experts Exchange to Warner Bros. What could take multiple guys 2 hours or more each to find is accessed in around 15 minutes on Experts Exchange." Mike Kapnisakis, Warner Bros.
  • "Our team likes having a resource that is more secure than just using Google and most experts using this service really know their stuff. It's nice to look here first versus using Google." Dayna Sellner, Lockheed Martin
  • "Anytime that I've been stumped with a problem, 9 out of 10 times Experts Exchange has either the accepted solution or an open discussion of the potential solution to the problem." Kenny Red, eBay Inc.

See what Experts Exchange can do for you.

Got a question?

We've got the answer.

Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Need individual assistance?

Our experts are ready to help.

If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Want to learn from the best?

Read articles from industry experts.

Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.

Screenshot of an Article

Working on a long term project?

Store your work and research.

Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Access the answers to your technology questions today.

Subscribe Now

30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.

What Makes Experts Exchange Unique?

Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.

Trusted by the world's most respected brands.

image of each brand's logo

Faithfully serving IT professionals since 1996.

Experts Exchange Logo

Try it out and discover for yourself.

Subscribe Now

30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.

Related Solutions

  1. Determine if mouse has wheel
    How do I determine if the user has an intellimouse?
  2. DETERMINE IF USER INPUT IS A PRIME NUMBER
    Whats up... Im new to assembly and need to write a program that will accept user input (number up to 10,000) and determine if that number is prime or not... Not quit sure how to handle this... What register do I load you user input into.. and how to determine is its prime or...
  3. determine file type
    after user giving me a file path, I want to check out if the file type is .doc or .tif file, how can i do that if the file extension can't reflect the file's real file type? for example, If there is a word file test.doc, then i rename it to test.txt how can i find out the f...
  4. Sending/Receiving 00 hex with Writefile/Readfile
    allright this is probably somewhat of a classic but I can't seem to figure it out. I have created a com-port communications program that allows you to send and receive to/from a different pc connected to it via a null-modem cable and running a com port monitor utility. This ...
  5. Understanding Hex Dump of helloworld.c
    Hi, I am trying to understand how to read hex dumps. For simplicity I wanted to start with hello.c. The executable created has 12904 bytes or ~807 lines of 16 bytes. I want to understand the different sections of the hex dump and if there is anything in general you can assum...

Free Tech Articles

  1. WARNING: 5 Reasons why you should NEVER fix a computer for free.
    It is in our nature to love the puzzle. We are obsessed. The lot of us. We love puzzles. We love the challenge. We thrive on finding the answer. We hate disarray. It bothers us deep in our soul. W...
  2. SCCM OSD Basic troubleshooting
    SCCM 2007 OSD is a fantastic way to deploy operating systems, however, like most things SCCM issues can sometimes be difficult to resolve due to the sheer volume of logs to sift through and the dispe...
  3. Migrate Small Business Server 2003 to Exchange 2010 and Windows 2008 R2
    This guide is intended to provide step by step instructions on how to migrate from Small Business Server 2003 to Windows 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010. For this migration to work you will need the fo...
  4. Create a Win7 Gadget
    This article shows you how to create a simple "Gadget" -- a sort of mini-application supported by Windows 7 and Vista. Gadgets can be dropped anywhere on the desktop to provide instant information, ...
  5. Outlook continually prompting for username and password
    There have been a lot of questions recently regarding Outlook prompting for a username and password whilst using Exchange 2007. There are a few reasons why this would happen and I will try to cover t...
  6. Backup Exchange 2010 Information Store using Windows Backup
    There seems to be quite a lot of confusion around the ability to backup Exchange 2010 using the built in Windows Backup feature. This stems from the omission of this feature prior to Exchange 2007 s...

Cloud Class Webinars

  1. Avoiding Bugs in Microsoft Access
    Alison Balter takes and in-depth look at avoiding bugs in Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the immediate window to debug your applications, invoking the debugger, using breakpoints to troubleshoot, stepping through code, setting the next statement to execute, ...
  2. Top 10 Best New Features in Visio 2010
    Scott Helmers gives live demonstrations of the top 10 new features in Visio 2010. This webinar will teach you how to create compelling diagrams by adding shapes to the page with a single click, linking the shapes in a diagram to data in Excel (or SQL Server, or SharePoint), ...
  3. IT Consultant Business Secrets Revealed
    Michael Munger, Experts Exchange tech pro and IT consultant, pulls back the curtain on his very successful businesses and answers question on every IT consultant and business owner should know about. He shares secrets on what he did to solve the 5 most common problems in IT, ...
  4. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
    Quest CTO, Mike Billon, gives an overview of the steps involved in building a dunamic disaster recovery plan. Through case studies and an examination of software/hardware tooles for monitoring and testing, you'll gain a better understandin of where you are, where you want ...
  5. Organize Your Visio Diagrams with Containers and Lists
    Scott Helmers uses cross functional flowcharts, wireframe diagrams, data graphic legends and seating charts to teach you: how to ustilize all three new structured diagram components in Visio 2010, the best practices for organizeing shapes in previous version of Visio, how to organize ...
  6. How to Us Objects, Properties, Events and Methods in Microsoft Access
    Alison Dalter gives an in-depbth look at objects, properties, events and methods in Microsoft Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the object browser, referring to objects, working with properties and methods, working with object variables, understanding the ...

Join the Community

Give a Little. Get a Lot.

Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.

Join the Community

Answers

 

by: breadtanPosted on 2009-05-23 at 03:53:12ID: 24457433

Let look at some basic explanation first - What is byte string
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_string

In short it is just some data type to represent the encoding of the string. Typically the string is terminated with NULL character else it has some length indicating the string. That can be an indication
where is the first character. Note the first character is also commonly known as Most Significant Byte (MSB).

In addition, when storing the string in memory, it can be Big Endien or Little Endien. See this link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Examples_of_storing_the_value_0x0A0B0C0D_in_memory

This can be another way of knowing where is the MSB. If we know the system used and able to find out the memory address (e.g. programmatically printing out pointer or array address) of the character (e.g. if it is Big Endien, the MSB of the string or first character will be at the lowest memory). See the extract on the system support for "Endieness" below:

> Well known processor architectures that use the little-endian format include x86, 6502, Z80, VAX, Loongson, and, largely, PDP-11. Processors using big-endian format are generally Motorola processors such as the 6800 and 68000 and PowerPC (which includes Apple's Macintosh line prior to the Intel switch) and System/370. SPARC historically used big-endian, though version 9 is bi-endian (see below).

Sometimes the byte string may be from some memory dump (snapshot f memory from debugger), use a hex editor to open the binary file and the memory location will also be depicted. The analysis is as similar.

But another quick an easy approach (if we know that it is simply ASCII and rightfully should be some know sentences or phrases), you can send the string for conversion using tool. Check out this simple online tool - just that it need ":" to separate each hex character (can be easily done by replace <space> with ":" in editor)
- http://www.dolcevie.com/js/converter.html

It really depends on the source of the string and encoding used for representation. If it is Unicode based, then it is word type (two byte per character) rather than the normal byte type. They are used normally for other languages...

Hope it helps

 

by: gdi67Posted on 2009-05-27 at 20:36:43ID: 24489565

Is it in the text file? If yes, Use hexedit which you can find easily in google.

 

by: breadtanPosted on 2009-05-28 at 06:56:41ID: 24493201

Also agreed with gdi67, can also try free hex editor-XVI32
http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/freeware/xvi32/xvi32.htm

You can load the file and see the offset and corresponding byte ordering in sequence.

 

by: sandy771Posted on 2009-07-01 at 07:51:23ID: 24754946

BIgendian and little endian are irrelevant when dealing with a string unless it is a pascal string - i.e. proceeded by a length byte and ONLY then if the lengthnof the string can be > 255 characters (i.e. longer than a value stored in a single byte. Your example clearly isn't a pascal string as it is 12 bytes long and not 73 (hex 49).

You had it right with your own explanation, but be aware that programmers usually count from 0 so when you refer to the first, second, third ... last byte it is unambiguous. When you refer to byte x you usually need to count teh first byte as byte 0.

 

by: sploithunterPosted on 2009-09-29 at 11:57:47ID: 25452110

The first byte is 'I' or 0x49; however, that bytes offset is 0 not 1 and the 12th bytes ('!') offset is 11, not 12

Is that what you are asking?

20120131-EE-VQP-002

3 Ways to Join

30-Day Free Trial

The Experts

98% positive feedback on 31,087 answers since March 2000. angeliii is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his work with MS SQL Server & Develoment.

He has also proven his knowledge of Visual Basic Programming, PHP Scripting and Oracle Databases.

The Experts

97% positive feedback on 10,752 answers since July 2000. lrmoore has more than 18 years experience in the networking industry.

The six-time Mircosoft MVPs specialties include firewalls, virtual private networking, and network management.

Testimonials

"...and excellent source for support... Kind of like having your very own IT dept." Electriciansnet

Testimonials

"I was apprehensive at signing up at first. However... it has already made my life as an IT administrator much easier." JaCrews

Testimonials

"WOW! You guys have great, active, and knowledgeable people on here." moore50

Business Clients

Business Clients

In the Press

"If you’ve got a question... Experts Exchange can supply an answer.”

In the Press

"...an invaluable aid for both IT professionals and those who require tech support."

In the Press

"where IT professionals provide quick answers on just about any topic"

Business Account Plans

Loading Advertisement...