Python Bytes to string to Bytes [duplicate]

Question

I know something similar has been asked before, but no answer has yet worked.

I make a byte string: salt = os.urandom(16) which gives something like: b'w\x05\xce^f\xdcbM\xe9\xb8c\x8b\x98\xd2\n\x11'

What I need is to give this to the user, so they can copy and paste, place it in a text document or anywhere, and then paste it back in the terminal later.

In short. I need to convert it to a string. And then back to its encoding.

I have tried salt.decode(encoding="utf-8") and many variations which all give me some form of UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't..., The only one that seemed to work was "".join(map(chr, salt)), but I can't figure out how to reverse this.

Thanks in advance. P.s. I am working in Python 3

Markus · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-18 12:33:35Z

1

The python module binsascii is most likely what you need. Example:

>>> import os
>>> salt = os.urandom(16)
>>> import binascii
>>> binascii.b2a_hex(salt)
'9df7cc8d135fb9f115e166e140153217'
>>> binascii.a2b_hex(binascii.b2a_hex(salt))
'\x9d\xf7\xcc\x8d\x13_\xb9\xf1\x15\xe1f\xe1@\x152\x17'

A number of other encodings are also available.

answered Sep 18, 2018 at 12:33

Markus

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