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

The other answers here provide the bits in big-endian order ('\x01' becomes '00000001')

In case you're interested in little-endian order of bits, which is useful in many cases, like common representations of bignums etc - here's a snippet for that:

def bits_little_endian_from_bytes(s):
    return ''.join(bin(ord(x))[2:].rjust(8,'0')[::-1] for x in s)

And for the other direction:

def bytes_from_bits_little_endian(s):
    return ''.join(chr(int(s[i:i+8][::-1], 2)) for i in range(0, len(s), 8))