File to Hex to File in python 2.7

Question

I'm trying to take a file and convert it's contents to hex, save that to a file, and then convert the hex string back to ascii and save that to a file. The below method works, but adds an extra empty line after ever line in the hex to ascii file, which should be identical to the initial file...

    import binascii
    filename = 'file.txt'
    with open(filename, 'rb') as f:
        content = f.read()
    out = binascii.hexlify(content)

    f = open('out.txt', 'w')
    f.write(out)
    f.close()

    asci = out.decode("hex")
    w = open('printed.txt', 'w')
    w.write(asci)
    w.close()

==================================================================================

After actually reading the python documentation, I realized my mistake. The code should be as follows. (Slightly altered to read from the out.txt...)

import binascii
filename = 'file.txt'
with open(filename, 'rb') as f:
    content = f.read()
out = binascii.hexlify(content)

f = open('out.txt', 'wb')
f.write(out)
f.close()

import binascii
filename = 'out.txt'
with open(filename, 'rb') as f:
    content = f.read()
asci = content.decode("hex")

asci = out.decode("hex")
w = open('printed.txt', 'wb')
w.write(asci)
w.close()

The key was adding the appending "b" to the the "w" in the open command to have the file opened in binary write mode...

Answer 1

Rather than using str.decode , you should try using binascii.unhexlify . decode might be doing the translation of line-breaks slightly differently, eg how it handles '\\r\\n' vs '\\n' .