Hexadecimal strings typically contain 0–9 and a–f, which gives plenty of opportunity for (naughty) words to form,¹¹1 Ned Batchelder, “Hex words,” March 20, 2007, accessed December 24, 2023.  e.g. “deadbabe”.

If we also accept “9” as a substitute for “g,” then even more (naughty) words can be built, e.g. “defacedfa9”. Your imagination is the limit.

Remove vowels

To avoid accidentally generating words, we can remove vowels (A E I O U, and arguably Y) from the list of possible characters, and additionally remove characters that can stand in for vowels (0 1 3 4).

The set of characters we use for representing hexadecimal strings therefore becomes shifted: instead of 0123456789abcdef, we now have 256789bcdfghjklm.

Performing this replacement is trivial with tr on the command line:

% echo 1337cafebabe | tr 0123456789abcdef 256789bcdfghjklm
577cjgmlhghl

Ruby’s String#tr does the same:

'1337cafebabe'.tr('0123456789abcdef', '256789bcdfghjklm')
# => "577cjgmlhghl"

Remove ambiguous characters

We can go further and remove ambiguous characters as well. While not necessary, it is helpful when writing down hexadecimal strings (especially when using non-conventional characters, like we do).

Ambiguous characters include B D G J Q S Z and 0 1 2 5 6 8 (with 0 and 1 already removed because they can substitute a vowel). The set of characters we use for representing hexadecimal strings has shifted again: instead of 256789bcdfghjklm (which replaced 0123456789abcdef), we now have 79cfhklmnprtvwxz.

We can use it the same way. Command line:

% echo 1337cafebabe | tr 0123456789abcdef 79cfhklmnprtvwxz
9ffmvrzxtrtx

Ruby:

'1337cafebabe'.tr('0123456789abcdef', '79cfhklmnprtvwxz')
# => "9ffmvrzxtrtx"

Note how 79cfhklmnprtvwxz is exactly 16 characters and ends with z. A wonderful coincidence.

See also

• Good human-usable tokens are not random strings
• Proquints