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

OK, the following answer is slightly beyond-scope if you only care about Python 3, but this question is the first Google hit even if you don't specify the Python version, so here's a way that works on both Python 2 and Python 3.

I'm also interpreting the question to be about converting bytes to the str type: that is, bytes-y on Python 2, and Unicode-y on Python 3.

Given that, the best approach I know is:

import six

bytes_to_hex_str = lambda b: ' '.join('%02x' % i for i in six.iterbytes(b))

The following assertion will be true for either Python 2 or Python 3, assuming you haven't activated the unicode_literals future in Python 2:

assert bytes_to_hex_str(b'jkl') == '6a 6b 6c'

(Or you can use ''.join() to omit the space between the bytes, etc.)