What's the correct way to convert bytes to a hex string in Python 3?

Question

What\'s the correct way to convert bytes to a hex string in Python 3?

I see claims of a bytes.hex method, bytes.decode codecs, and have tri

Answer 1

Python has bytes-to-bytes standard codecs that perform convenient transformations like quoted-printable (fits into 7bits ascii), base64 (fits into alphanumerics), hex escaping, gzip and bz2 compression. In Python 2, you could do:

b'foo'.encode('hex')

In Python 3, str.encode / bytes.decode are strictly for bytes<->str conversions. Instead, you can do this, which works across Python 2 and Python 3 (s/encode/decode/g for the inverse):

import codecs
codecs.getencoder('hex')(b'foo')[0]

Starting with Python 3.4, there is a less awkward option:

codecs.encode(b'foo', 'hex')

These misc codecs are also accessible inside their own modules (base64, zlib, bz2, uu, quopri, binascii); the API is less consistent, but for compression codecs it offers more control.