Converting a hex values to ASCII

Question

What is the most 'Pythonic' way of translating

'\xff\xab\x12'

into

'ffab12'

I looked for functions that can do it, but they all want to translate to ASCII (so '\x40' to 'a'). I want to have the hexadecimal digits in ASCII.

Which version of Python are you using?

Jon Clements
– Jon Clements

2016-06-20 10:04:17 +00:00
Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 10:04 — Jon Clements
– Jon Clements, Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 10:04
@JonClements 2.7.3

Bart Friederichs
– Bart Friederichs

2016-06-20 10:05:53 +00:00
Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 10:05 — Bart Friederichs
– Bart Friederichs, Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 10:05

Jon Clements · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-20 10:14:45Z

5

There's a module called binascii that contains functions for just this:

>>> import binascii
>>> binascii.hexlify('\xff\xab\x12')
'ffab12'
>>> binascii.unhexlify('ffab12')
'\xff\xab\x12'

answered Jun 20, 2016 at 10:14

Jon Clements

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Comments

Yotam Salmon · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-20 10:10:02Z

0

original = '\xff\xab\x12'
result = original.replace('\\x', '')
print result

It's \x because it's escaped. a.replace(b,c) just replaces all occurances of b with c in a.

What you want is not ascii, because ascii translates 0x41 to 'A'. You just want it in hexadecimal base without the \x (or 0x, in some cases)

Edit!!
Sorry, I thought the \x is escaped. So, \x followed by 2 hex digits represents a single char, not 4..

print "\x41"

Will print

A

So what we have to do is to convert each char to hex, then print it like that:

res = ""
for i in original:
   res += hex(ord(i))[2:].zfill(2)
print res

Now let's go over this line:

hex(ord(i))[2:]

ord(c) - returns the numerical value of the char c
hex(i) - returns the hex string value of the int i (e.g if i=65 it will return 0x41.
[2:] - cutting the "0x" prefix out of the hex string.
.zfill(2) - padding with zeroes

So, making that with a list comprehension will be much shorter:

result = "".join([hex(ord(c))[2:].zfill(2) for c in original])
print result

edited Jun 20, 2016 at 10:10

answered Jun 20, 2016 at 10:01

Yotam Salmon

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4 Comments

Bart Friederichs Over a year ago

But my original string is not escaped. It is what I said it is: '\xff\xab\x12'.

Yotam Salmon Over a year ago

Oh, so if that's your original string (not escaped) I'll edit my answer :)

Bart Friederichs Over a year ago

And I do want ASCII, because I need to send it as ASCII to a site.

Yotam Salmon Over a year ago

Corrected and added explanation

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