Python: Convert Unicode-Hex-String to Unicode

Question

I have a hex-string made from a unicode string with that function:

def toHex(s):
    res = \"\"
    for c in s:
        res += \"%02X\" % ord(c) #at least 2          


        

Answer 1

Can't be done. Using %02X loses too much information. You should be using something like UTF-8 first and converting that, instead of inventing a broken encoding.

>>> u"Knödel".encode('utf-8').encode('hex')
'4b6ec3b664656c'

Answer 2

This seems to work just fine:

binascii.unhexlify(binascii.hexlify(u"Knödel".encode('utf-8'))).decode('utf-8')

Comes back to the original object. You can do the same for the chinese text if it's encoded properly, however ord(x) already destroys the text you started from. You'll need to encode it first and only then treat like a string of bytes.

Answer 3

When I was working with Unicode in a VB app a while ago the first 1 or 2 digits would be removed if they were a "0". Meaning "&H00A2" would automatically be converted to "&HA2", I just created a small function to check the length of the string and if it was less than 4 chars add the missing 0's. I'm not sure if this is what's happening to you, but I thought I would give bit of information as something to be aware of.