How to create python bytes object from long hex string?

I have a long sequence of hex digits in a string, such as

000000000000484240FA063DE5D0B744ADBED63A81FAEA390000C8428640A43D5005BD44

only much longer, several kilobytes. Is there a builtin way to convert this to a bytes object in python 2.6/3?

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

Works in Python 2.7 and higher including python3:

result = bytearray.fromhex('deadbeef')

Note: There seems to be a bug with the bytearray.fromhex() function in Python 2.6. The python.org documentation states that the function accepts a string as an argument, but when applied, the following error is thrown:

>>> bytearray.fromhex('B9 01EF')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: fromhex() argument 1 must be unicode, not str`

Method 2

result = bytes.fromhex(some_hex_string)

Method 3

You can do this with the hex codec. ie:

>>> s='000000000000484240FA063DE5D0B744ADBED63A81FAEA390000C8428640A43D5005BD44'
>>> s.decode('hex')
'x00x00x00x00x00<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="8ff7bfbfc7cdcf">[email protected]</a>xfax06=xe5xd0xb7Dxadxbexd6:x81xfaxea9x00x00xc8B<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="dda5e5eb9d">[email protected]</a>xa4=Px05xbdD'

Method 4

Try the binascii module

from binascii import unhexlify
b = unhexlify(myhexstr)

Method 5

import binascii

binascii.a2b_hex(hex_string)

Thats the way I did it.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0