[newbie] String to binary conversion

[MRAB]

On 06/08/2012 21:46, Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
>
> If I have a string "abcd" then, with 8-bit encoding of each character,
> there is a corresponding 32-bit binary integer. How could I best
> obtain that integer and from that integer backwards again obtain the
> original string? Thanks in advance.
>
Try this (Python 3, in which strings are Unicode):
>>> import struct
 >>> # For a little-endian integer
>>> struct.unpack("<I", "abcd".encode("latin-1"))[0]
1684234849
>>> hex(_)
'0x64636261'

or this (Python 2, in which strings are bytestrings):
 >>> import struct
 >>> # For a little-endian integer
 >>> struct.unpack("<I", "abcd")[0]
1684234849
 >>> hex(_)
'0x64636261'