Appending QString to a QByteArray as a hexadecimal instead characters?

Question

A peculiar thing that I encountered is that in a loop that I am doing where I am populating a QByteArray with a chunks of a QStringList. To be more precise, the QStringList takes a standard QString and splits it into smaller bits on every time it encounters a "-" within the string. Ergo, if a QString containing "A1-B2-C3-D4-E5", it would populate the list as small chunks (list[0]="A1",list[1]="B2",list[2]="C3",...). However, I need those bytes to populate a QByteArray and when I use a loop it only takes the chars of it and fills the QByteArray as bytearray[0]="A",bytearray[1]="1",bytearray[2]="2" and so on. Considering the code I am using, I am wondering what wrong has happened?

Here is the code:

QStringList inputArray = input.split('-');
                QByteArray output;

                for(int i = 0; i < inputArray.count(); i++)
                {
                     output.append(inputArray.at(i).toLatin1());
                }

                ui->lineEdit->setText(output);

Answer 1

qDebug() << QByteArray("ACDC"); // outputs "ACDC"

Provided that those character pairs are indeed hexadecimals, you need to tell specify that:

qDebug() << QByteArray::fromHex("ACDC"); // outputs "\xAC\xDC"

The former byte array will be 4 bytes long, whereas the latter will only be 2 bytes long, as each char pair is decoded as hexadecimal.