fnHex2Dec Archives - BI Insight

A Power Query Function to Convert HEX, OCT and BIN values to DEC

A while ago I wrote a blogpost on how to use Unicode characters in Power BI. In that blogpost I used a recursive Power Query function to convert Hex values to Dec values. A few weeks back one of my site visitors kindly shared his non-recursive version of Power Query function which beautifully does the job. A big shout out to Rocco Lupoi for sharing his code. So, I decided to share it with everyone so more people can leverage his nice Power Query function. I have touched his code a bit though, but it was more of a cosmetic change, so all credits of this blogpost goes to Rocco. The benefits of his code is not limited to being non-recursive. The code below converts numbers of any base when the base is smaller than 16 like Binary and Oct, so it is not limited to Hex values only. The other benefit of the below code is that it is not case sensitive (note to the digits step on the code below).

Here is the fnHex2Dec function for Power Query:

(input as text, optional base as number) as number =>
let
        values = [
                0=0,
                1=1,
                2=2,
                3=3,
                4=4,
                5=5,
                6=6,
                7=7,
                8=8,
                9=9,
                A=10,
                B=11,
                C=12,
                D=13,
                E=14,
                F=15
        ],
        digits = Text.ToList(Text.Upper(input)),
        dim = List.Count(digits)-1,
        exp = if base=null then 16 else base,
        Result = List.Sum(
                        List.Transform(
                                {0..dim}
                                , each Record.Field(values, digits{_}) * Number.Power(exp, dim - _)
                                )
                        )
in
        Result

As you see in the code above, the base parameter is optional, so if not provided base 16 would be the default.

This is how we can invoke the above function: