Here’s a utility I whipped up quickly to save out a file from a hex string, as from [NSData description] — kinda a reverse hexdump.

While doing some debugging, I realised I needed to visualise an intermediate UIImage from the iPhone’s camera. Not being able to use the simulator, and thus be able to write to a file easily, this was my solution: po UIImageJPEGRepresentation(photo, 0.8) to print out the data as a hex string, then copied it to the clipboard, saved it as a text file, and used an NSScanner to scan in each int, fix the endianness and write it out as a file.

Insane? Maybe, but it did the trick. So, I turned it into a service that takes the selected hex string and writes it to the Desktop.

This is the service: SaveHexStringAsData.service.zip (unzip it to Library/Services)

In the debugger, print an NSData, then select the hex string (not including the surrounding angle brackets), then select this service. The data will be saved to your Desktop – rename it to the appropriate file type to open it.

Here’s the source:

// Build me with gcc hex2data.m -framework Foundation -framework Cocoa -o hex2data
#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
 
int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) {
  NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
 
  NSFileHandle *input = [NSFileHandle fileHandleWithStandardInput];
  NSData *inputData = [NSData dataWithData:[input readDataToEndOfFile]];
  NSString *inputString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:inputData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
 
  NSScanner *scanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:inputString];
  while ( ![scanner isAtEnd] ) {
    int i;
    [scanner scanHexInt:&i];
 
    i = ((i & 0xff000000) >> 24) | ((i & 0x00ff0000) >> 8) | ((i & 0x0000ff00) << 8) | ((i & 0xff) << 24);
 
    fwrite(&i, sizeof(i), 1, stdout);
  }
 
  [pool drain];
  return 0;
}