how to do bitwise exclusive or of two strings in python?

Question

I would like to perform a bitwise exclusive or of two strings in python, but xor of strings are not allowed in python. How can I do it ?

Answer 1

If you want to operate on bytes or words then you'll be better to use Python's array type instead of a string. If you are working with fixed length blocks then you may be able to use H or L format to operate on words rather than bytes, but I just used 'B' for this example:

>>> import array
>>> a1 = array.array('B', 'Hello, World!')
>>> a1
array('B', [72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 44, 32, 87, 111, 114, 108, 100, 33])
>>> a2 = array.array('B', ('secret'*3))
>>> for i in range(len(a1)):
    a1[i] ^= a2[i]


>>> a1.tostring()
';\x00\x0f\x1e\nXS2\x0c\x00\t\x10R'