Converting a hex values to ASCII - python

What is the most 'Pythonic' way of translating
'\xff\xab\x12'
into
'ffab12'
I looked for functions that can do it, but they all want to translate to ASCII (so '\x40' to 'a'). I want to have the hexadecimal digits in ASCII.

There's a module called binascii that contains functions for just this:
>>> import binascii
>>> binascii.hexlify('\xff\xab\x12')
'ffab12'
>>> binascii.unhexlify('ffab12')
'\xff\xab\x12'

original = '\xff\xab\x12'
result = original.replace('\\x', '')
print result
It's \x because it's escaped. a.replace(b,c) just replaces all occurances of b with c in a.
What you want is not ascii, because ascii translates 0x41 to 'A'. You just want it in hexadecimal base without the \x (or 0x, in some cases)
Edit!!
Sorry, I thought the \x is escaped. So, \x followed by 2 hex digits represents a single char, not 4..
print "\x41"
Will print
A
So what we have to do is to convert each char to hex, then print it like that:
res = ""
for i in original:
res += hex(ord(i))[2:].zfill(2)
print res
Now let's go over this line:
hex(ord(i))[2:]
ord(c) - returns the numerical value of the char c
hex(i) - returns the hex string value of the int i (e.g if i=65 it will return 0x41.
[2:] - cutting the "0x" prefix out of the hex string.
.zfill(2) - padding with zeroes
So, making that with a list comprehension will be much shorter:
result = "".join([hex(ord(c))[2:].zfill(2) for c in original])
print result

Related

How to print unicode from a generator expression in python?

Create a list from generator expression:
V = [('\\u26' + str(x)) for x in range(63,70)]
First issue: if you try to use just "\u" + str(...) it gives a decoder error right away. Seems like it tries to decode immediately upon seeing the \u instead of when a full chunk is ready. I am trying to work around that with double backslash.
Second, that creates something promising but still cannot actually print them as unicode to console:
>>> print([v[0:] for v in V])
['\\u2663', '\\u2664', '\\u2665', .....]
>>> print(V[0])
\u2663
What I would expect to see is a list of symbols that look identical to when using commands like '\u0123' such as:
>>> print('\u2663')
♣
Any way to do that from a generated list? Or is there a better way to print them instead of the '\u0123' format?
This is NOT what I want. I want to see the actual symbols drawn, not the Unicode values:
>>> print(['{}'.format(v[0:]) for v in V])
['\\u2663', '\\u2664', '\\u2665', '\\u2666', '\\u2667', '\\u2668', '\\u2669']
Unicode is a character to bytes encoding, not escape sequences. Python 3 strings are Unicode. To return the character that corresponds to a Unicode code point use chr :
chr(i)
Return the string representing a character whose Unicode code point is the integer i. For example, chr(97) returns the string 'a', while chr(8364) returns the string '€'. This is the inverse of ord().
The valid range for the argument is from 0 through 1,114,111 (0x10FFFF in base 16). ValueError will be raised if i is outside that range.
To generate the characters between 2663 and 2670:
>>> [chr(x) for x in range(2663,2670)]
['੧', '੨', '੩', '੪', '੫', '੬', '੭']
Escape sequences use hexadecimal notation though. 0x2663 is 9827 in decimal, and 0x2670 becomes 9840.
>>> [chr(x) for x in range(9827,9840)]
['♣', '♤', '♥', '♦', '♧', '♨', '♩', '♪', '♫', '♬', '♭', '♮', '♯']
You can use also use hex numeric literals:
>>> [chr(x) for x in range(0x2663,0x2670)]
['♣', '♤', '♥', '♦', '♧', '♨', '♩', '♪', '♫', '♬', '♭', '♮', '♯']
or, to use exactly the same logic as the question
>>> [chr(0x2600 + x) for x in range(0x63,0x70)]
['♣', '♤', '♥', '♦', '♧', '♨', '♩', '♪', '♫', '♬', '♭', '♮', '♯']
The reason the original code doesn't work is that escape sequences are used to represent a single character in a string when we can't or don't want to type the character itself. The interpreter or compiler replaces them with the corresponding character immediatelly. The string \\u26 is an escaped \ followed by u, 2 and 6:
>>> len('\\u26')
4

How to add a character before a string?

I am new and I'm trying to insert a character before a string.
If I have a string like so:
'wB0JSYuEUshUkgpKi8TRTwv/EABgBAQADAQAAAAAAA'
I want to add b before the string but not part of the string-like so:
b'wB0JSYuEUshUkgpKi8TRTwv/EABgBAQADAQAAAAAAA'
Here's what I tried:
test = 'b' + words[1]
test
but this obviously returns the b within the string, which is not what I want.
That b is not part of the string, it's a special syntax in Python 3.x to indicate that it's a bytes literal (see this post). If you want to convert a "normal" string into a bytes literal, do this:
st = 'abc'
bl = st.encode()
bl
=> b'abc'
I'm not exactly sure what you mean. But assuming words is a list of strings, and index 1 = 'wB0JSYuEUshUkgpKi8TRTwv/EABgBAQADAQAAAAAAA' you could print(f'b {words[1]}')
There is a bit of confusion here. In python "" is a string and b"" is a byte string. These are completely different objects. They can be converted to one another, but they are not the same thing. You can't add "b to a string". Essentially a byte string b"" is a string of the bytes that generate a string, and a string is well the string. For example,
x = 'STRING' #The string itself.
y = x.encode() #The bytes for the string. Note that ascii bytes are written in ascii.
a = 'MyName®' #The string itself.
b = a.encode() #The bytes for the string. The last character takes two non-ascii bytes.
c = b.decode() #Covert the bytes back to a string.

Add a non escaped escape character to python bytearray

I have an API that is demanding that the quotation marks in my XML attributes are escaped, so <cmd_id="1"> will not work, it requires <cmd_id=\"1\">.
I have tried iterating through my string, for example:
b'<?xml version=\'1.0\' encoding=\'utf8\'?>\n<tx><cmd id="1">SetChLevel</cmd><name>C</name><value>30</value></tx>'
Each time that I encounter a " (ascii 34) I will replace it with an escape character (ascii 92) and another quote. Infuriatingly this results in:
b'<?xml version=\'1.0\' encoding=\'utf8\'?>\n<tx><cmd id=\\"1\\">SetChLevel</cmd><name>C</name><value>30</value></tx>'
where the escapes have been escaped. As a sanity check I replaced 92 with any other character and it works as expected.
temp = b'<?xml version=\'1.0\' encoding=\'utf8\'?>\n<tx><cmd id="1">\
SetChLevel</cmd><name>C</name><value>30</value></tx>'
i = 0
j = 0
payload = bytearray(len(temp) + 4)
for char in temp:
if char == 34:
payload[i] = 92
i += 1
payload[i] = 34
i += 1
j += 1
else:
payload[i] = temp[j]
i += 1
j += 1
print(bytes(payload))
I would assume that character 92 would appear once but something is escaping the escape!
Your problem is the result of a very common misunderstanding for programmers new to Python.
When printing a string (or bytes) to the console, Python escapes the escape character (\) to show a string that, when used in Python as a literal, would give you the exact same value.
So:
s = 'abc\\abc'
print(s)
Prints abc\abc, but on the interpreter you get:
>>> s = 'abc\\abc'
>>> print(s)
abc\abc
>>> s
'abc\\abc'
Note that this is correct. After all print(s) should show the string on the console as it is, while s on the interpreter is asking Python to show you the representation of s, which includes the quotes and the escape characters.
Compare:
>>> repr(s)
"'abc\\\\abc'"
repr here prints the representation of the representation of s.
For bytes, things are further complicated because the representation is printed when using print, since print prints a string and a bytes needs to be decoded first, i.e.:
>>> print(some_bytes.decode('utf-8')) # or whatever the encoding is
In short: your code was doing what you wanted it to, it does not duplicate escape characters, you only thought it did because you were looking at the representation of the bytes, not the actual bytes content.
By the way, this also means that you don't have to be paranoid and go through the trouble of writing custom code to replace characters based on their ASCII values, you can simply:
>>> example = bytes('<some attr="value">test</some>', encoding='utf-8')
>>> result = example.replace(b'"', b"\\\"")
>>> print(result.decode('utf-8'))
<some attr=\"value\">test</some>
I won't pretend that b"\\\"" is intuitive, perhaps b'\\"' is better - but both require that you understand the difference between the representation of a string, or its printed value.
So, finally:
>>> example = b'<some attr="value">test</some>'
>>> result = example.replace(b'"', b'\\"')
>>> print(result.decode('utf-8'))
<some attr=\"value\">test</some>

Using struct.pack

My code looks like this :
import struct
str = "AAAAAAA"
len = len(str)+32
package = struct.pack("!H",len)
print repr(package)
the result is :
"\x00'"
When I use len = len(str)
the result is \x00\x07
Why when len is larger than 32,it is not working?
You're misunderstanding the "\x00'" result. It's a mixture of a string hexadecimal character code value and a regular printable ASCII character. If it were displayed purely in hexadecimal character codes, it would be "\x00x\x27".
The \x27 in decimal is the integer 39, which is the result of len(str)+32. It's also the character code of the ' (single quote) character, which is part of what repr() is displaying.

as I hold the string of hexadecimal format without encoding the string?

The general problem is that I need the hexadecimal string stays in that format to assign it to a variable and not to save the coding?
no good:
>>> '\x61\x74'
'at'
>>> a = '\x61\x74'
>>> a
'at'
works well, but is not as:
>>> '\x61\x74'
'\x61\x74' ????????
>>> a = '\x61\x74'
>>> a
'\x61\x74' ????????
Use r prefix (explained on SO)
a = r'\x61\x74'
b = '\x61\x74'
print (a) #prints \x61\x74
print (b) # prints at
It is the same data. Python lets you specify a literal string using different methods, one of which is to use escape codes to represent bytes.
As such, '\x61' is the same character value as 'a'. Python just chooses to show printable ASCII characters as printable ASCII characters instead of the escape code, just because that makes working with bytestrings that much easier.
If you need the literal slash, x character and the two digit 6 and 1 characters (so a string of length 4), you need to double the slash or use raw strings.
To illustrate:
>>> '\x61' == 'a' # two notations for the same value
True
>>> len('\x61') # it's just 1 character
1
>>> '\\x61' # escape the escape
'\\x61'
>>> r'\x61' # or use a raw literal instead
'\\x61'
>>> len('\\x61') # which produces 4 characters
4

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