Showing posts with label ascii. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ascii. Show all posts
Saturday, 20 November 2021

Python convert hex to ascii

I've been having trouble with this simple task of converting a string of hexadecimal digits to text. My research and testing were insufficient. While the characters are not from extended ascii table, this is a easy task. But my strings can and will include letters like "áðéíóþæ". The sting comes from snmp and in this example I will be using the word "Ísland" for this demo hex "cd 73 6c 61 6e 64" Here is one of the most promising code snipped

 
import binascii

def hex_to_ascii(hex_str):
    hex_str = hex_str.replace(' ', '').replace('0x', '').replace('\t', '').replace('\n', '')
    ascii_str = binascii.unhexlify(hex_str)
    return ascii_str
 
hex_input = 'cd 73 6c 61 6e 64'
ascii_output = hex_to_ascii(hex_input)

print(format(ascii_output))

The output was b'\xcdsland' so it does not encode the first letter like all me previous tempts. Finally I found this snipped:
 
>>> L = [104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 44, 32, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100]
>>> ''.join(chr(i) for i in L)
'hello, world'

Next step was to fit join(chr) in my snipped like so..
   
import binascii

def hex_to_ascii(hex_str):
    hex_str = hex_str.replace(' ', '').replace('0x', '').replace('\t', '').replace('\n', '')
    ascii_str = binascii.unhexlify(hex_str)
    return ascii_str
 
hex_input = 'cd 73 6c 61 6e 64'
ascii_output = hex_to_ascii(hex_input)
ascii_output = ''.join(chr(i) for i in ascii_output)

print(format(ascii_output))

--cheers