hexadecimal string to byte array in python

Suppose your hex string is something like "deadbeef".

"deadbeef"

Convert it to a string:

result= hex_string.decode("hex")

Convert it to a byte array:

import array
result= array.array('B', hex_string.decode("hex"))

Convert it to a list of byte values:

result= map(ord, hex_string.decode("hex"))

or, possibly:

result= bytearray(hex_string.decode("hex"))

if on a recent enough Python.
_

However, it's possible that by “hex string” you just mean a string with unprintable characters.

"\x12\x45\x00AB"

In that case, use the options above ignoring the .decode("hex") part.

A good one liner is:

byte_list = map(ord, hex_string)

This will iterate over each char in the string and run it through the ord() function. Only tested on python 2.6, not too sure about 3.0+.

-Josh

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]

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.