Python Hex File Write

Question

I have a list that looks like this:

['\x12', '\x13', '\x05', ... , '\xF2']

and I'm trying to write it to a file in binary form like this:

This is what I'm doing now:

for dataLine in readData:
    print int(binascii.hexlify(dataLine), 16)

And then converting to 8 bit binary like so:

def dobin(n):
    digs = []

    while n > 0:
        digs.append(str(n % 2))
        n /= 2

    for x in range(len(digs), 8):
        digs.append('0')

    digs.reverse()
    return ''.join(digs)

Is there an easy way to convert these to binary or a better way all together?

Andrew Clark · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-13 00:01:38Z

1

Here is a version that should work on Python 2.6 (or higher):

>>> data = ['\x12', '\x13', '\x05', '\xF2']
>>> [bin(ord(c))[2:].zfill(8) for c in data]                                                                                                                 
['00010010', '00010011', '00000101', '11110010']

So to write this to a file, I would probably do something like this:

f = open('some_file', 'w')
f.write('\n'.join(bin(ord(c))[2:].zfill(8) for c in data))
f.close()

Edit: Didn't realize that bin() was not available on Python 2.5, you can define the following bin() function to get this to work:

def bin(i):
    s = []
    prefix = '0b' if i >= 0 else '-0b'
    if i < 0: i = -i
    while i:
        s.append('1' if i & 1 else '0')
        i = i >> 1
    return prefix + (''.join(reversed(s)) if s else '0')

edited Jul 13, 2013 at 0:01

answered Jul 12, 2013 at 20:20

Andrew Clark

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3 Comments

spizzak Over a year ago

I don't believe bin is available in 2.5 ... I'm getting a name not defined error

abarnert Over a year ago

As the docs say: "New in version 2.6." But since the OP didn't specify 2.5 as a requirement, it's probably easier to just change the answer, so I'll do that.

spizzak Over a year ago

I could've swore I mentioned that- my mistake. Thanks for the reply!

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