How to read binary data and display as a little endian hexstring in Python?

Question

I want to read 4 byte of a binary file until it ends and want to display the result as a hex string e.g.

First 4 Bytes of my file are:

4D 5A 90 00

Result should be:

0x00905A4D

And I also want to be able to do different operations on the result for example:

result = 0x00905A4D
tmp = result & 0xFF

tmp should then be 0x4D

What's the most elegant way for doing this?

possible duplicate of Python conversion from binary string to hexadecimal — Tim Biegeleisen
– Tim Biegeleisen, Commented May 9, 2015 at 13:57
Also, the syntax for hexadecimal literals is: 0x6789abcd. So in your example you'd want to use result = 0x00905a4d; tmp = result & 0xff. — Phylogenesis
– Phylogenesis, Commented May 9, 2015 at 14:01

Phylogenesis · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-09 14:36:59Z

5

The following code does what you want:

from struct import unpack

inputFile = open("test.txt", "r")
byteString = inputFile.read(4)

# Unpack the first 4 bytes as a little ended unsigned integer
result = unpack("<I", byteString)[0]

# Do some bit arithmetic
tmp = result & 0xff

# Show variable values
print("%08x %08x" % (result, tmp))

edited May 9, 2015 at 14:36

answered May 9, 2015 at 14:26

Phylogenesis

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