SweetScape Knowledgebase

When editing binary files, you may see a byte sequence in a file and would like to find another occurrence of that sequence. You may try to make a copy of the byte sequence with Ctrl+C and then open the Find dialog with Ctrl+F and paste the bytes into the field using Ctrl+V; however, this does not work as expected when dealing with binary data because using Ctrl+C copies the actual binary data to the clipboard. For example, in the below screenshot:

selecting the byte sequence '67 68 69 6A' on the left also selects the ASCII values for that byte sequence 'ghij' on the right. When you copy this data to the clipboard with Ctrl+C, it copies the 4 bytes which when pasted into the Find dialog are displayed as 'ghij'. Instead, what you want to do is to convert the byte sequence to Hex Text (i.e. the ASCII characters '6','7',' ','6','8',' ' etc.) by using Ctrl+Shift+C instead of Ctrl+C (this is also available on the menu under 'Edit > Copy As > Copy As Hex Text'). Then when you open the Find dialog with Ctrl+F and paste with Ctrl+V, you will get the string "67 68 69 6A" instead of "ghij". Note that when searching for a byte sequence, make sure the 'Hex Bytes (h)' option is selected in the 'Type' drop-down list.