How to convert binary string to ascii string in python?

Question

I've made a little python program that reads binary from a file and stores it to a text file, read the text file and store the binary. But, I can't get the binary to work... it reads the files like this:

f_bin = open(bin_file,"rb")
to_bin_data = f_bin.read()
bin_data = bin(reduce(lambda x, y: 256*x+y, (ord(c) for c in to_bin_data), 0))
f_bin.close()

this one doesen't work for me... Convert binary to ASCII and vice versa

Something like this webpage: http://www.roubaixinteractive.com/PlayGround/Binary_Conversion/Binary_To_Text.asp

Edit: I've now made a long if else script for it, but thanks for the answers

Solution 1

Let's take the word 'hello' which is 0110100001100101011011000110110001101111

To translate that back to characters we can use chr and int (with a base of 2) and some list slicing...

''.join(chr(int(bin_text[i:i+8], 2)) for i in xrange(0, len(bin_text), 8))

If we wanted to take 'hello' and convert it to binary we can use ord and string formatting...

''.join('{:08b}'.format(ord(c)) for c in 'hello')

Solution 2

Maybe you can use built-in functions:

>>> myString = "hello"
>>> ba = bytearray(myString)
>>> ba[0]
104
>>> bin(ba[0])
'0b1101000'

Split the 0b:

>>> bin(ba[0]).split('b')[1]
'1101000'

or

>>> bin(ba[0])[2:]
'1101000'

I'll hope you can solve your problem with the snippets! :)

Solution 3

I use the struct module:

import struct
buf=struct.unpack('c',to_bin_data) # for one character
buf=struct.unpack('s',to_bin_data) # for a string 

edit: sorry, misunderstood the question... This works for binary data, not for strings of binary representaion of characters.