Fastest bitwise xor between two multibyte binary data variables

Question

What is the fastest way to implementat the following logic:

def xor(data, key):
    l = len(key)

    buff = \"\"
    for i in range(0, len(data)):
        b         


        

Answer 1

This code should work in Python 2.6+ including Py3k.

from binascii import hexlify as _hexlify
from binascii import unhexlify as _unhexlify


def packl(lnum, padmultiple=0):
    """Packs the lnum (which must be convertable to a long) into a
    byte string 0 padded to a multiple of padmultiple bytes in size. 0
    means no padding whatsoever, so that packing 0 result in an empty
    string.  The resulting byte string is the big-endian two's
    complement representation of the passed in long."""

    if lnum == 0:
        return b'\0' * padmultiple
    elif lnum < 0:
        raise ValueError("Can only convert non-negative numbers.")
    s = hex(lnum)[2:]
    s = s.rstrip('L')
    if len(s) & 1:
        s = '0' + s
    s = _unhexlify(s)
    if (padmultiple != 1) and (padmultiple != 0):
        filled_so_far = len(s) % padmultiple
        if filled_so_far != 0:
            s = b'\0' * (padmultiple - filled_so_far) + s
    return s

def unpackl(bytestr):
    """Treats a byte string as a sequence of base 256 digits
    representing an unsigned integer in big-endian format and converts
    that representation into a Python integer."""

    return int(_hexlify(bytestr), 16) if len(bytestr) > 0 else 0

def xor(data, key):
    dlen = len(data)
    klen = len(key)
    if dlen > klen:
        key = key * ((dlen + klen - 1) // klen)
    key = key[:dlen]
    result = packl(unpackl(data) ^ unpackl(key))
    if len(result) < dlen:
         result = b'\0' * (dlen - len(result)) + result
    return result

This will also work in Python 2.7 and 3.x. It has the advantage of being a lot simpler than the previous one while doing basically the same thing in approximately the same amount of time:

from binascii import hexlify as _hexlify
from binascii import unhexlify as _unhexlify

def xor(data, key):
    dlen = len(data)
    klen = len(key)
    if dlen > klen:
        key = key * ((dlen + klen - 1) // klen)
    key = key[:dlen]
    data = int(_hexlify(data), 16)
    key = int(_hexlify(key), 16)
    result = (data ^ key) | (1 << (dlen * 8 + 7))
    # Python 2.6/2.7 only lines (comment out in Python 3.x)
    result = memoryview(hex(result))
    result = (result[4:-1] if result[-1] == 'L' else result[4:])
    # Python 3.x line
    #result = memoryview(hex(result).encode('ascii'))[4:]
    result = _unhexlify(result)
    return result