CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonhexrepresentation
kevin
kevin

Reputation: 4367

Converting a hex-string representation to actual bytes in Python

i need to load the third column of this text file as a hex string

http://www.netmite.com/android/mydroid/1.6/external/skia/emoji/gmojiraw.txt

>>> open('gmojiraw.txt').read().split('\n')[0].split('\t')[2]
'\\xF3\\xBE\\x80\\x80'

how do i open the file so that i can get the third column as hex string:

'\xF3\xBE\x80\x80'

i also tried binary mode and hex mode, with no success.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 18010

Answers (5)

Eli Bendersky
Eli Bendersky

Reputation: 273716

You can:

  1. Remove the \x-es
  2. Use .decode('hex') on the resulting string

Code:

>>> '\\xF3\\xBE\\x80\\x80'.replace('\\x', '').decode('hex')
'\xf3\xbe\x80\x80'

Note the appropriate interpretation of backslashes. When the string representation is '\xf3' it means it's a single-byte string with the byte value 0xF3. When it's '\\xf3', which is your input, it means a string consisting of 4 characters: \, x, f and 3

Upvotes: 7

tzot
tzot

Reputation: 96051

Quick'n'dirty reply

your_string.decode('string_escape')

>>> a='\\xF3\\xBE\\x80\\x80'
>>> a.decode('string_escape')
'\xf3\xbe\x80\x80'
>>> len(_)
4

Bonus info

>>> u='\uDBB8\uDC03'
>>> u.decode('unicode_escape')

Some trivia

What's interesting, is that I have Python 2.6.4 on Karmic Koala Ubuntu (sys.maxunicode==1114111) and Python 2.6.5 on Gentoo (sys.maxunicode==65535); on Ubuntu, the unicode_escape-decode result is \uDBB8\uDC03 and on Gentoo it's u'\U000fe003', both correctly of length 2. Unless it's something fixed between 2.6.4 and 2.6.5, I'm impressed the 2-byte-per-unicode-character Gentoo version reports the correct character.

Upvotes: 7

neil
neil

Reputation: 3645

After stripping out the "\x" as Eli's answer, you can just do:

int("F3BE8080",16)

Upvotes: 1

John La Rooy
John La Rooy

Reputation: 304413

If you are using Python2.6+ here is a safe way to use eval

>>> from ast import literal_eval
>>> item='\\xF3\\xBE\\x80\\x80'
>>> literal_eval("'%s'"%item)
'\xf3\xbe\x80\x80'

Upvotes: 5

user97370
user97370

Reputation:

If you trust the source, you can use eval('"%s"' % data)

Upvotes: 0

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