Python 3.1.1 string to hex

You’ve already got some good answers, but I thought you might be interested in a bit of the background too.

Firstly you’re missing the quotes. It should be:

"hello".encode("hex")

Secondly this codec hasn’t been ported to Python 3.1. See here. It seems that they haven’t yet decided whether or not these codecs should be included in Python 3 or implemented in a different way.

If you look at the diff file attached to that bug you can see the proposed method of implementing it:

import binascii
output = binascii.b2a_hex(input)

Use hexlify – http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/stdlib/binascii-module.html

binascii methodes are easier by the way

>>> import binascii
>>> x=b'test'
>>> x=binascii.hexlify(x)
>>> x
b'74657374'
>>> y=str(x,'ascii')
>>> y
'74657374'
>>> x=binascii.unhexlify(x)
>>> x
b'test'
>>> y=str(x,'ascii')
>>> y
'test'

Hope it helps. 🙂

base64.b16encode and base64.b16decode convert bytes to and from hex and work across all Python versions. The codecs approach also works, but is less straightforward in Python 3.

In Python 3, all strings are unicode. Usually, if you encode an unicode object to a string, you use .encode('TEXT_ENCODING'), since hex is not a text encoding, you should use codecs.encode() to handle arbitrary codecs. For example:

>>>> "hello".encode('hex')
LookupError: 'hex' is not a text encoding; use codecs.encode() to handle arbitrary codecs
>>>> import codecs
>>>> codecs.encode(b"hello", 'hex')
b'68656c6c6f'

Again, since “hello” is unicode, you need to indicate it as a byte string before encoding to hexadecimal. This may be more inline with what your original approach of using the encode method.

The differences between binascii.hexlify and codecs.encode are as follow:

• binascii.hexlify

  Hexadecimal representation of binary data.

  The return value is a bytes object.

  Type: builtin_function_or_method

• codecs.encode

  encode(obj, [encoding[,errors]]) -> object

  Encodes obj using the codec registered for encoding. encoding defaults
  to the default encoding. errors may be given to set a different error
  handling scheme. Default is ‘strict’ meaning that encoding errors raise
  a ValueError. Other possible values are ‘ignore’, ‘replace’ and
  ‘xmlcharrefreplace’ as well as any other name registered with
  codecs.register_error that can handle ValueErrors.

  Type: builtin_function_or_method

In Python 3.5+, encode the string to bytes and use the hex() method, returning a string.

s = "hello".encode("utf-8").hex()
s
# '68656c6c6f'

Optionally convert the string back to bytes:

b = bytes(s, "utf-8")
b
# b'68656c6c6f'

Yet another method:

s = 'hello'

h = ''.join([hex(ord(i)) for i in s]);

# outputs: '0x680x650x6c0x6c0x6f'

This basically splits the string into chars, does the conversion through hex(ord(char)), and joins the chars back together. In case you want the result without the prefix 0x then do:

h = ''.join([str(hex(ord(i)))[2:4] for i in s]);

# outputs: '68656c6c6f'

Tested with Python 3.5.3.

The easiest way to do it in Python 3.5 and higher is:

>>> 'halo'.encode().hex()
'68616c6f'

If you manually enter a string into a Python Interpreter using the utf-8 characters, you can do it even faster by typing b before the string:

>>> b'halo'.hex()
'68616c6f'

Equivalent in Python 2.x:

>>> 'halo'.encode('hex')
'68616c6f'