Write a string of 1's and 0's to a binary file?

Question

I want to take a string of 1's and 0's and convert it into an actual binary file(simply writing the string of 1's and 0's to a file would just make it either ascii file containing "00110001"s and "00110000"s ). I would prefer to do this in python or directly from a bash shell, but java or C is fine too. this is probably a one time use.

Thanks.

Answer 1

In Python, use the int built-in function to convert the string of 0s and 1s to a number:

>>> int("00100101", 2)
37

Then use the chr built-in to convert a 8-bit integer (that is, in the inclusive range 0-255) to a character.

>>> chr(_)
'%'

The result of chr can be simply written to a file (opened in binary mode) with the file.write method.