No, you probably could not "print it out better," because it would contain character escapes ... and your terminal, if nothing else, would try its best to print it "properly." I have been known to copy hex sequences to two different text files and then use 'diff' to compare them. As you say, it is very maddening, but you simply cannot 'eyeball' this stuff. There are too many unrelated-things between the data and your eyeballs!