Convert Format-Hex PowerShell table to raw hex dump

Question

I used the Format-Hex command in PowerShell to get the hex contents of a string. My command "some_string" | format-hex gives me the output in a table. How can I make it into a raw hex dump so it's something like 736f6d655f737472696e67?

Answer 1

Expand the Bytes property of the resulting object, format each byte as a double-digit hex number, then join them:

("some_string" | Format-Hex | Select-Object -Expand Bytes | ForEach-Object { '{0:x2}' -f $_ }) -join ''

However, it'd probably be simpler and more straightforward to write a custom function to converts a string to a hex representation:

function ConvertTo-Hex {
    [CmdletBinding()]
    Param(
        [Parameter(
            Position=0,
            Mandatory=$true,
            ValueFromPipeline=$true,
            ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true
        )]
        [string]$InputObject
    )

    $hex = [char[]]$InputObject |
           ForEach-Object { '{0:x2}' -f [int]$_ }

    if ($hex -ne $null) {
        return (-join $hex)
    }
}

"some_string" | ConvertTo-Hex