A Macintosh format for representing a binary file using only printable characters. The file is converted to lines of letters, numbers and punctuation. Because BinHex files are simply text they can be sent through most electronic mail systems and stored on most computers. However the conversion to text makes the file larger, so it takes longer to transmit a file in BinHex format than if the file was represented some other way.

Filename extension: .hqx.

See also BinHex 4.0, uuencode.