Convert bytes to bits in python

Question

I am working with Python3.2. I need to take a hex stream as an input and parse it at bit-level. So I used

bytes.fromhex(input_str)

to convert t

Answer 1

To binary:

bin(byte)[2:].zfill(8)

Answer 2

Use ord when reading reading bytes:

byte_binary = bin(ord(f.read(1))) # Add [2:] to remove the "0b" prefix

Or

Using str.format():

'{:08b}'.format(ord(f.read(1)))

Answer 3

I think simplest would be use numpy here. For example you can read a file as bytes and then expand it to bits easily like this:

Bytes = numpy.fromfile(filename, dtype = "uint8")
Bits = numpy.unpackbits(Bytes)