String to Bits

By Gribouillis on Sep 7th, 2009 6:30 am

This snippet defines a function a2bits which converts a characters string to a string of 0's and 1's showing its bitwise representation.

import sys
if sys.version_info[0] >= 3:
    bin = "{0:#0b}".format
    from functools import reduce

def a2bits(chars):
    "Convert a string to its bits representation as a string of 0's and 1's"
    return bin(reduce(lambda x, y : (x<<8)+y, (ord(c) for c in chars), 1))[3:]

1 Year Ago

Here is a much faster version using binascii.hexlify:

from binascii import hexlify

def a2bits(bytes):
    """Convert a sequence of bytes to its bits representation as a string of 0's and 1's
    This function needs python >= 2.6"""
    return bin(int(b"1" + hexlify(bytes), 16))[3:]

Gribouillis

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