In python, how to convert a hex ascii string to raw internal binary string?

Question

In python, how to convert a hex ASCII string to binary string?

Example:

01000001B8000102030405060708090A0B0C0D0E0F101112131415161718191A1B1C1D1E1F202122232425262728292A2B2C2D2E2F303132333435362021222324

Needs to be converted to a binary string. (0A need to be converted to 1010, not to ASCII bit 1000001 which is 65)

edit : Changed "raw binary" in question to "raw internal binary" string for better clarity.

what do you mean by binary string? is it a string or a list of integers you`re interested in? — moooeeeep
– moooeeeep, Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 12:35
I mean internal binary representation . I got the answer as base64.b16decode — Lunar Mushrooms
– Lunar Mushrooms, Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 12:51

fulmicoton · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09 12:35:59Z

16

import base64
data = base64.b16decode("01000001B8000102030405")

answered Dec 9, 2011 at 12:35

fulmicoton

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eumiro · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09 12:35:20Z

8

Is this what you're searching for?

hex_string = '0A'
'{0:b}'.format(int(hex_string, 16))
# returns '1010'

or

''.join('{0:04b}'.format(int(c, 16)) for c in hex_string)

edited Dec 9, 2011 at 12:35

answered Dec 9, 2011 at 12:29

eumiro

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4 Comments

Lunar Mushrooms Over a year ago

thanks. But my string is very long. It wont fit in an integer. The converted binary shall go to some kind of continuous memory structures like array or so.

eumiro Over a year ago

@LunarMushrooms - this works with your example string too. But I have added a special version for you…

Tim Pietzcker Over a year ago

Did you even try this on your string? It works great (ints can have any size):

'100000000000000000000000110111000000000000000000100000010000000110000010000000101000001100000011100001000000010010000101000001011000011000000110100001110000011110001000000010001000100100001001100010100000101010001011000010111000110000001100100011010000110110001110000011101000111100001111100100000001000010010001000100011001001000010010100100110001001110010100000101001001010100010101100101100001011010010111000101111001100000011000100110010001100110011010000110101001101100010000000100001001000100010001100100100'

Lunar Mushrooms Over a year ago

Thanks. But it is converting again to ascii string "1010" . As suggested in another answer , base64.b16decode worked for me

tzot · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-24 22:38:27Z

7

You probably need the .decode('hex') method of strings (Python 2.x).

data= ("01000001B8000102030405060708090A0B0C0D0E0F10111213141516"
    "1718191A1B1C1D1E1F202122232425262728292A2B"
    "2C2D2E2F303132333435362021222324")
data.decode('hex')

Otherwise, you can use base64.b16decode, but you might want to supply a True to the second parameter (casefold) if your input contains lowercase hex digits A to F.

answered Dec 24, 2011 at 22:38

tzot

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Comments

David Webb · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09 12:52:07Z

I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "binary string". If you mean a string storing the binary data you can use the binascii module.

>>> data = "01000001B8000102030405060708090A0B0C0D0E0F101112131415161718191A1B1C1D1E1F202122232425262728292A2B2C2D2E2F303132333435362021222324"
>>> import binascii
>>> binary = binascii.a2b_hex(data)
>>> binary
'\x01\x00\x00\x01\xb8\x00\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\x07\x08\t\n\x0b\x0c\r\x0e\x0f\x10\x11\x12\x13\x14\x15\x16\x17\x18\x19\x1a\x1b\x1c\x1d\x1e\x1f !"#$%&\'()*+,-./0123456 !"#$'

However, if you really want a string containing lots of "0"s and "1"s you need to go one stage further:

>>> "".join("{:08b}".format(ord(i)) for i in binary)
'0000000100000000000000000000000110111000000000000000000100000010000000110000010000000101000001100000011100001000000010010000101000001011000011000000110100001110000011110001000000010001000100100001001100010100000101010001011000010111000110000001100100011010000110110001110000011101000111100001111100100000001000010010001000100011001001000010010100100110001001110010100000101001001010100010101100101100001011010010111000101111001100000011000100110010001100110011010000110101001101100010000000100001001000100010001100100100'

Larry E · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-23 20:46:31Z

1

An easy way to do what you're trying to do... convert your string to a hex decimal then use the built in bin function to convert it to binary.

dec_string = int(your_string, 16) #cast as int

bin_string = bin(dec_string) #convert to binary

edited Mar 23, 2015 at 20:46

answered Mar 23, 2015 at 20:41

Larry E

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