I have a ASCII string = "abcdefghijk". I want to write this to a binary file in binary format using python.
I tried following:
str = "abcdefghijk"
fp = file("test.bin", "wb")
hexStr = "".join( (("\\x%s") % (x.encode("hex"))) for x in str)
fp.write(hexStr)
fp.close()
However, when I open the test.bin I see the following in ascii format instead of binary.
\x61\x62\x63\x64\x65\x66\x67
I understand it because for two slashes here ("\\x%s"). How could I resolve this issue? Thanks in advance.
Update :
Following gives me the expected result:
file = open("test.bin", "wb")
file.write("\x61\x62\x63\x64\x65\x66\x67")
file.close()
But how do I achieve this with "abcdef" ASCII string. ?
You misunderstood what \xhh
does in Python strings. Using \x
notation in Python strings is just syntax to produce certain codepoints.
You can use '\x61'
to produce a string, or you can use 'a'
; both are just two ways of saying give me a string with a character with hexadecimal value 61, e.g. the a
ASCII character:
>>> '\x61'
'a'
>>> 'a'
'a'
>>> 'a' == '\x61'
True
The \xhh
syntax then, is not the value; there is no \
and no x
and no 6
and 1
character in the final result.
You should just write your string:
somestring = 'abcd'
with open("test.bin", "wb") as file:
file.write(somestring)
There is nothing magical about binary files; the only difference with a file opened in text mode is that a binary file will not automatically translate \n
newlines to the line separator standard for your platform; e.g. on Windows writing \n
produces \r\n
instead.
You certainly do not have to produce hexadecimal escapes to write binary data.
On Python 3 strings are Unicode data and cannot just be written to a file without encoding, but on Python the str
type is already encoded bytes. So on Python 3 you'd use:
somestring = 'abcd'
with open("test.bin", "wb") as file:
file.write(somestring.encode('ascii'))
or you'd use a byte string literal; b'abcd'
.