How to convert string to binary?

Question

I am in need of a way to get the binary representation of a string in python. e.g.

st = "hello world"
toBinary(st)

Is there a module of some neat way of doing this?

Answer 1

Here is a comparison of bit lengths in various encodings of ASCII 127 (delete). Note the respective 24, 16, and 32 bit byte order mark (BOM) in UTF-8-SIG, UTF-16, and UTF-32:

>>> for encoding in ('utf-8', 'utf-8-sig', 'utf-16', 'utf-16-le', 'utf-16-be', 'utf-32', 'utf-32-le', 'utf-32-be'): print(''.join(' '.join((f'{encoding:9}', f'{len(bs):2}', bs)) for bs in [''.join(f'{byte:08b}' for byte in '\x7f'.encode(encoding))]))
...
utf-8      8 01111111
utf-8-sig 32 11101111101110111011111101111111
utf-16    32 11111111111111100111111100000000
utf-16-le 16 0111111100000000
utf-16-be 16 0000000001111111
utf-32    64 1111111111111110000000000000000001111111000000000000000000000000
utf-32-le 32 01111111000000000000000000000000
utf-32-be 32 00000000000000000000000001111111

Answer 2

''.join(format(i, 'b') for i in bytearray(str, encoding='utf-8'))

This works okay since its easy to now revert back to the string as no zeros will be added to reach the 8 bits to form a byte hence easy to revert to string to avoid complexity of removing the zeros added.

Answer 3

If by binary you mean bytes type, you can just use encode method of the string object that encodes your string as a bytes object using the passed encoding type. You just need to make sure you pass a proper encoding to encode function.

In [9]: "hello world".encode('ascii')                                                                                                                                                                       
Out[9]: b'hello world'

In [10]: byte_obj = "hello world".encode('ascii')                                                                                                                                                           

In [11]: byte_obj                                                                                                                                                                                           
Out[11]: b'hello world'

In [12]: byte_obj[0]                                                                                                                                                                                        
Out[12]: 104

Otherwise, if you want them in form of zeros and ones --binary representation-- as a more pythonic way you can first convert your string to byte array then use bin function within map :

>>> st = "hello world"
>>> map(bin,bytearray(st))
['0b1101000', '0b1100101', '0b1101100', '0b1101100', '0b1101111', '0b100000', '0b1110111', '0b1101111', '0b1110010', '0b1101100', '0b1100100']
 

Or you can join it:

>>> ' '.join(map(bin,bytearray(st)))
'0b1101000 0b1100101 0b1101100 0b1101100 0b1101111 0b100000 0b1110111 0b1101111 0b1110010 0b1101100 0b1100100'

Note that in python3 you need to specify an encoding for bytearray function :

>>> ' '.join(map(bin,bytearray(st,'utf8')))
'0b1101000 0b1100101 0b1101100 0b1101100 0b1101111 0b100000 0b1110111 0b1101111 0b1110010 0b1101100 0b1100100'

You can also use binascii module in python 2:

>>> import binascii
>>> bin(int(binascii.hexlify(st),16))
'0b110100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000111011101101111011100100110110001100100'

hexlify return the hexadecimal representation of the binary data then you can convert to int by specifying 16 as its base then convert it to binary with bin.

Answer 4

Something like this?

>>> st = "hello world"
>>> ' '.join(format(ord(x), 'b') for x in st)
'1101000 1100101 1101100 1101100 1101111 100000 1110111 1101111 1110010 1101100 1100100'

#using `bytearray`
>>> ' '.join(format(x, 'b') for x in bytearray(st, 'utf-8'))
'1101000 1100101 1101100 1101100 1101111 100000 1110111 1101111 1110010 1101100 1100100'

Answer 5

In Python version 3.6 and above you can use f-string to format result.

str = "hello world"
print(" ".join(f"{ord(i):08b}" for i in str))

01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100

• The left side of the colon, ord(i), is the actual object whose value will be formatted and inserted into the output. Using ord() gives you the base-10 code point for a single str character.

• The right hand side of the colon is the format specifier. 08 means width 8, 0 padded, and the b functions as a sign to output the resulting number in base 2 (binary).

Answer 6

a = list(input("Enter a string\t: "))
def fun(a):
    c =' '.join(['0'*(8-len(bin(ord(i))[2:]))+(bin(ord(i))[2:]) for i in a])
    return c
print(fun(a))

Answer 7

We just need to encode it.

'string'.encode('ascii')

Answer 8

def method_a(sample_string):
    binary = ' '.join(format(ord(x), 'b') for x in sample_string)

def method_b(sample_string):
    binary = ' '.join(map(bin,bytearray(sample_string,encoding='utf-8')))


if __name__ == '__main__':

    from timeit import timeit

    sample_string = 'Convert this ascii strong to binary.'

    print(
        timeit(f'method_a("{sample_string}")',setup='from __main__ import method_a'),
        timeit(f'method_b("{sample_string}")',setup='from __main__ import method_b')
    )

# 9.564299999998184 2.943955828988692

method_b is substantially more efficient at converting to a byte array because it makes low level function calls instead of manually transforming every character to an integer, and then converting that integer into its binary value.

Answer 9

This is an update for the existing answers which used bytearray() and can not work that way anymore:

>>> st = "hello world"
>>> map(bin, bytearray(st))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: string argument without an encoding

Because, as explained in the link above, if the source is a string, you must also give the encoding:

>>> map(bin, bytearray(st, encoding='utf-8'))
<map object at 0x7f14dfb1ff28>

Answer 10

You can access the code values for the characters in your string using the ord() built-in function. If you then need to format this in binary, the string.format() method will do the job.

a = "test"
print(' '.join(format(ord(x), 'b') for x in a))

(Thanks to Ashwini Chaudhary for posting that code snippet.)

While the above code works in Python 3, this matter gets more complicated if you're assuming any encoding other than UTF-8. In Python 2, strings are byte sequences, and ASCII encoding is assumed by default. In Python 3, strings are assumed to be Unicode, and there's a separate bytes type that acts more like a Python 2 string. If you wish to assume any encoding other than UTF-8, you'll need to specify the encoding.

In Python 3, then, you can do something like this:

a = "test"
a_bytes = bytes(a, "ascii")
print(' '.join(["{0:b}".format(x) for x in a_bytes]))

The differences between UTF-8 and ascii encoding won't be obvious for simple alphanumeric strings, but will become important if you're processing text that includes characters not in the ascii character set.