Convert bytes to bits in python

Question

I am working with Python3.2. I need to take a hex stream as an input and parse it at bit-level. So I used

bytes.fromhex(input_str)

to convert t

Answer 1

What about something like this?

>>> bin(int('ff', base=16))
'0b11111111'

This will convert the hexadecimal string you have to an integer and that integer to a string in which each byte is set to 0/1 depending on the bit-value of the integer.

As pointed out by a comment, if you need to get rid of the 0b prefix, you can do it this way:

>>> bin(int('ff', base=16)).lstrip('0b')
'11111111'

or this way:

>>> bin(int('ff', base=16))[2:]
'11111111'