Python: How to convert a string containing hex bytes to a hex string

Question

I\'m thinking binascii is the module I\'m looking for, but I can\'t quite seem to get the exact results for which I am looking.

Here\'s what I want to do. I want to

Answer 1

In all versions of Python, you can use the function binascii.a2b_hex() (also known as binascii.unhexlify()):

>>> import binascii
>>> s = '356a192b7913b04c54574d18c28d46e6395428ab'
>>> binascii.a2b_hex(s)
'5j\x19+y\x13\xb0LTWM\x18\xc2\x8dF\xe69T(\xab'

In Python 3.x, you can use bytes.fromhex(s).

In Python 2.x, you can use the hex str-to-str codec:

>>> s.decode("hex")
'5j\x19+y\x13\xb0LTWM\x18\xc2\x8dF\xe69T(\xab'

The codec internally calls binascii.a2b_hex().

Answer 2

With binascii module:

>>> from binascii import unhexlify
>>> s = '356a192b7913b04c54574d18c28d46e6395428ab'
>>> unhexlify(s)
'5j\x19+y\x13\xb0LTWM\x18\xc2\x8dF\xe69T(\xab'