# ansible-vault format **URL:** \ **Category:** Ansible Project\ **Created:** [October 23, 2023, 12:52pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-vault-format/38542 "2023-10-23T12:52:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dnmvisser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/8e8cbc/32.png) [@dnmvisser](https://forum.ansible.com/u/dnmvisser)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2023, 12:52pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-vault-format/38542/1 "2023-10-23T12:52:14Z")
Hii, I’ve always wondered what the format of the ansible vault is, more specifically why it consists of only numbers, as that seems like an insufficient way to represent data. It is as if the content has to go through some medium that can only understand digits? Dick ---
**Author:** ![sivel](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/sivel/32/1198_2.png) [@sivel](https://forum.ansible.com/u/sivel)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2023, 2:22pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-vault-format/38542/2 "2023-10-23T14:22:11Z")
The encryption used is AES256, but what you are seeing in the vault output is not the direct result of the encryption. The result currently goes through binascii.hexlify 2 times, resulting in only having numbers. We are looking at removing the 2nd pass in the future. ---
**Author:** ![Will\_McDonald](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f475e1/32.png) [@Will\_McDonald](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Will_McDonald)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2023, 2:24pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-vault-format/38542/3 "2023-10-23T14:24:15Z")
I was just reading [https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/vault\_guide/vault\_using\_encrypted\_content.html#ansible-vault-payload-format-1-1-1-2](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/vault_guide/vault_using_encrypted_content.html#ansible-vault-payload-format-1-1-1-2) trying to figure out quite how that resulted in numerals only… 🙂