Convert binary to ASCII and vice versa

Question

Using this code to take a string and convert it to binary:

bin(reduce(lambda x, y: 256*x+y, (ord(c) for c in \'hello\'), 0))

this outputs:<

Answer 1

Built-in only python

Here is a pure python method for simple strings, left here for posterity.

def string2bits(s=''):
    return [bin(ord(x))[2:].zfill(8) for x in s]

def bits2string(b=None):
    return ''.join([chr(int(x, 2)) for x in b])

s = 'Hello, World!'
b = string2bits(s)
s2 = bits2string(b)

print 'String:'
print s

print '\nList of Bits:'
for x in b:
    print x

print '\nString:'
print s2

---

String:
Hello, World!

List of Bits:
01001000
01100101
01101100
01101100
01101111
00101100
00100000
01010111
01101111
01110010
01101100
01100100
00100001

String:
Hello, World!