String to hexadecimal conversion

[Praveena P]

Hi folks,

I am new to Python... so am not too sure about how the type conversion
works.

I have to read a file that contains hexadecimal data and use the data
further to do some arithmetic calculations.
A sample of the input is : 00000000000020E0000032F800000000400022005E
The problem I am facing is this:
I am using f.read(2) to read a byte at a time, but the data that is
read is a string rather than a number. So it kind of hampers any
arithmetic operations I perform on this data...

Could you please suggest some method I could use for this?

Thanks guys!
Praveena