hexadecimal string to byte array in python

Question

hexadecimal string to byte array in python

Question

I have a long Hex string that represents a series of values of different types. I wish to convert this Hex String into a byte array so that I can shift each value out and convert it into its proper data type.

Richard

2011/04/13

Popular Answer

There is a built-in function in bytearray that does what you intend.

bytearray.fromhex("de ad be ef 00")

It returns a bytearray and it reads hex strings with or without space separator.

kugg

2012/11/13

Read less...

provided I understood correctly, you should look for binascii.unhexlify

import binascii
a='45222e'
s=binascii.unhexlify(a)
b=[ord(x) for x in s]

Bruce

2011/04/13

Assuming you have a byte string like so

"\x12\x45\x00\xAB"

and you know the amount of bytes and their type you can also use this approach

import struct

bytes = '\x12\x45\x00\xAB'
val = struct.unpack('<BBH', bytes)

#val = (18, 69, 43776)

As I specified little endian (using the '<' char) at the start of the format string the function returned the decimal equivalent.

0x12 = 18

0x45 = 69

0xAB00 = 43776

B is equal to one byte (8 bit) unsigned

H is equal to two bytes (16 bit) unsigned

More available characters and byte sizes can be found here

The advantages are..

You can specify more than one byte and the endian of the values

Disadvantages..

You really need to know the type and length of data your dealing with

Hovo

2012/09/10

You should be able to build a string holding the binary data using something like:

data = "fef0babe"
bits = ""
for x in xrange(0, len(data), 2)
  bits += chr(int(data[x:x+2], 16))

This is probably not the fastest way (many string appends), but quite simple using only core Python.

unwind

2011/04/13

You can use the Codecs module in the Python Standard Library, i.e.

import codecs

codecs.decode(hexstring, 'hex_codec')

velsim

2019/08/22

def hex2bin(s):
    hex_table = ['0000', '0001', '0010', '0011',
                 '0100', '0101', '0110', '0111',
                 '1000', '1001', '1010', '1011',
                 '1100', '1101', '1110', '1111']
    bits = ''
    for i in range(len(s)):
        bits += hex_table[int(s[i], base=16)]
    return bits

Dmitry Sobolev

2013/06/30

tzot · Accepted Answer · 7/25/2018 8:11:15 AM

Suppose your hex string is something like

>>> hex_string = "deadbeef"

Convert it to a string (Python ≤ 2.7):

>>> hex_data = hex_string.decode("hex")
>>> hex_data
"\xde\xad\xbe\xef"

or since Python 2.7 and Python 3.0:

>>> bytes.fromhex(hex_string)  # Python ≥ 3
b'\xde\xad\xbe\xef'

>>> bytearray.fromhex(hex_string)
bytearray(b'\xde\xad\xbe\xef')

Note that bytes is an immutable version of bytearray.