CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonunicodehex
Robert
Robert

Reputation: 247

Python: Convert Unicode-Hex-String to Unicode

I have a hex-string made from a unicode string with that function:

def toHex(s):
    res = ""
    for c in s:
        res += "%02X" % ord(c) #at least 2 hex digits, can be more
    return res

hex_str = toHex(u"...")

This returns a string like this one:

"80547CFB4EBA5DF15B585728"

That's a sequence of 6 chinese symbols.
But 

u"Knödel"

converts to

"4B6EF664656C"

What I need now is a function to convert this back to the original unicode. The chinese symbols seem to have a 2-byte representation while the second example has 1-byte representations for all characters. So I can't just use unichr() for each 1- or 2-byte block.

I've already tried

binascii.unhexlify(hex_str)

but this seems to convert byte-by-byte and returns a string, not unicode. I've also tried

binascii.unhexlify(hex_str).decode(...)

with different formats. Never got the original unicode string.

Thank you a lot in advance!

Upvotes: 5

Views: 17406

Answers (3)

Tony
Tony

Reputation: 9

When I was working with Unicode in a VB app a while ago the first 1 or 2 digits would be removed if they were a "0". Meaning "&H00A2" would automatically be converted to "&HA2", I just created a small function to check the length of the string and if it was less than 4 chars add the missing 0's. I'm not sure if this is what's happening to you, but I thought I would give bit of information as something to be aware of.

Upvotes: 0

viraptor
viraptor

Reputation: 34145

This seems to work just fine:

binascii.unhexlify(binascii.hexlify(u"Knödel".encode('utf-8'))).decode('utf-8')

Comes back to the original object. You can do the same for the chinese text if it's encoded properly, however ord(x) already destroys the text you started from. You'll need to encode it first and only then treat like a string of bytes.

Upvotes: 4

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

Reputation: 798626

Can't be done. Using %02X loses too much information. You should be using something like UTF-8 first and converting that, instead of inventing a broken encoding.

>>> u"Knödel".encode('utf-8').encode('hex')
'4b6ec3b664656c'

Upvotes: 1

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