String to Binary Bits Conversion

Question

How do I convert a string, for example,

"To Infinity and Beyond!"

to a stream of binary digits? I want to implement DES encryption in Python. But this kind of encryption requires a plaintext size of 64 bits. The length of bits notwithstanding, how to do I actually convert it into a stream of bits for encryption?

Also, the conversion to bits should be such that post encryption, decryption can also be done effectively ( by bit conversion of even the ' ' in the string).

I would like to know how can this be accomplished in general.

'{0:b}'.format("") won't work.

So how do I do it?

docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#func-bytes, docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#func-bytearray — wwii
– wwii, Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 19:48
Possible duplicate of Best way to convert string to bytes in Python 3? — Mike Maazallahi
– Mike Maazallahi, Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 19:49
"Binary" is more of a concept, whereas computer languages deal with types. In python 3 most interfaces that process arbitrary "binary" values accept bytes and similar types. — President James K. Polk
– President James K. Polk, Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 22:56

Kaiwen Chen · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-14 19:55:44Z

2

This is the most pythonic way I can think to do it:

>>> string = "hello"
>>> [bin(i) for i in bytearray(string, 'utf8')]
['0b1101000', '0b1100101', '0b1101100', '0b1101100', '0b1101111']

answered Feb 14, 2019 at 19:55

Kaiwen Chen

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Comments

Chad · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-16 08:04:09Z

0

python 2.7

You could do this like that:

s = "To Infinity and Beyond!"  # s for string
s = ' '.join(format(ord(x.decode('utf-8')), 'b') for x in s)
print str(s)

edited Feb 16, 2019 at 8:04

answered Feb 14, 2019 at 20:01

Chad

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2 Comments

Luke Joshua Park Over a year ago

ord doesn't respect UTF-8, so for a large number of possible strings this code will fail. Also be aware that while encryption algorithms (like DES) operate on binary, they don't operate on literal strings of binary data (e.g. "0110101010101").

Chad Over a year ago

now it will work with utf-8 and if you want binary data and not binary string you could use split and convert the string to binary

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