Converting a hex-string representation to actual bytes in Python

Question

i need to load the third column of this text file as a hex string

http://www.netmite.com/android/mydroid/1.6/external/skia/emoji/gmojiraw.txt

>>> open('gmojiraw.txt').read().split('\n')[0].split('\t')[2]
'\\xF3\\xBE\\x80\\x80'

how do i open the file so that i can get the third column as hex string:

'\xF3\xBE\x80\x80'

i also tried binary mode and hex mode, with no success.

Answer 1

You can:

1. Remove the \x-es
2. Use .decode('hex') on the resulting string

Code:

>>> '\\xF3\\xBE\\x80\\x80'.replace('\\x', '').decode('hex')
'\xf3\xbe\x80\x80'

Note the appropriate interpretation of backslashes. When the string representation is '\xf3' it means it's a single-byte string with the byte value 0xF3. When it's '\\xf3', which is your input, it means a string consisting of 4 characters: \, x, f and 3

Answer 2

Quick'n'dirty reply

your_string.decode('string_escape')

>>> a='\\xF3\\xBE\\x80\\x80'
>>> a.decode('string_escape')
'\xf3\xbe\x80\x80'
>>> len(_)
4

Bonus info

>>> u='\uDBB8\uDC03'
>>> u.decode('unicode_escape')

Some trivia

What's interesting, is that I have Python 2.6.4 on Karmic Koala Ubuntu (sys.maxunicode==1114111) and Python 2.6.5 on Gentoo (sys.maxunicode==65535); on Ubuntu, the unicode_escape-decode result is \uDBB8\uDC03 and on Gentoo it's u'\U000fe003', both correctly of length 2. Unless it's something fixed between 2.6.4 and 2.6.5, I'm impressed the 2-byte-per-unicode-character Gentoo version reports the correct character.