How to convert string to byte arrays?

Question

How can I convert a string to its byte value? I have a string "hello" and I want to change is to something like "/x68..." .

Answer 1

Python 2.6 and later have a bytearray type which may be what you're looking for. Unlike strings, it is mutable, ie, you can change individual bytes "in place" rather than having to create a whole new string. It has a nice mix of the features of lists and strings. And it also makes your intent clear, that you are working with arbitrary bytes rather than text.

Answer 2

Perhaps you want this (Python 2):

>>> map(ord,'hello')
[104, 101, 108, 108, 111]

For a Unicode string this would return Unicode code points:

>>> map(ord,u'Hello, 马克')
[72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 44, 32, 39532, 20811]

But encode it to get byte values for the encoding:

>>> map(ord,u'Hello, 马克'.encode('chinese'))
[72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 44, 32, 194, 237, 191, 203]
>>> map(ord,u'Hello, 马克'.encode('utf8'))
[72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 44, 32, 233, 169, 172, 229, 133, 139]

Answer 3

If you want to get hexadecimal string representation you could do:

"hello".encode("hex") # '68656c6c6f'

And to meet your reference representation (don't take it seriously, guess this is not what you really want ):

"".join(["/x%02x" % ord(c) for c in "hello"]) # '/x68/x65/x6c/x6c/x6f'