Converting a hex string to a byte array

This ought to work:

int char2int(char input)
{
  if(input >= '0' && input <= '9')
    return input - '0';
  if(input >= 'A' && input <= 'F')
    return input - 'A' + 10;
  if(input >= 'a' && input <= 'f')
    return input - 'a' + 10;
  throw std::invalid_argument("Invalid input string");
}

// This function assumes src to be a zero terminated sanitized string with
// an even number of [0-9a-f] characters, and target to be sufficiently large
void hex2bin(const char* src, char* target)
{
  while(*src && src[1])
  {
    *(target++) = char2int(*src)*16 + char2int(src[1]);
    src += 2;
  }
}

Depending on your specific platform there's probably also a standard implementation though.

This implementation uses the built-in strtol function to handle the actual conversion from text to bytes, but will work for any even-length hex string.

std::vector<char> HexToBytes(const std::string& hex) {
  std::vector<char> bytes;

  for (unsigned int i = 0; i < hex.length(); i += 2) {
    std::string byteString = hex.substr(i, 2);
    char byte = (char) strtol(byteString.c_str(), NULL, 16);
    bytes.push_back(byte);
  }

  return bytes;
}