hex string to character in python

Question

I have a hex string like:

data = \"437c2123\"

I want to convert this string to a sequence of characters according to the ASCII table. The

Answer 1

The ord function converts characters to numerical values and the chr function does the inverse. So to convert 97 to "a", do ord(97)

Answer 2

Since Python 2.6 you can use simple:

data_con = bytes.fromhex(data)

Answer 3

In [17]: data = "437c2123"

In [18]: ''.join(chr(int(data[i:i+2], 16)) for i in range(0, len(data), 2))
Out[18]: 'C|!#'

Here:

• for i in range(0, len(data), 2) iterates over every second position in data: 0, 2, 4 etc.
• data[i:i+2] looks at every pair of hex digits '43', '7c', etc.
• chr(int(..., 16)) converts the pair of hex digits into the corresponding character.
• ''.join(...) merges the characters into a single string.

Answer 4

In Python2

>>> "437c2123".decode('hex')
'C|!#'

In Python3 (also works in Python2, for <2.6 you can't have the b prefixing the string)

>>> import binascii
>>> binascii.unhexlify(b"437c2123")
b'C|!#'