You misunderstood what \xhh
does in Python strings. Using \x
notation in Python strings is just syntax to produce certain codepoints.
You can use '\x61'
to produce a string, or you can use 'a'
; both are just two ways of saying give me a string with a character with hexadecimal value 61, e.g. the a
ASCII character:
>>> '\x61' 'a' >>> 'a' 'a' >>> 'a' == '\x61' True
The \xhh
syntax then, is not the value; there is no \
and no x
and no 6
and 1
character in the final result.
You should just write your string:
somestring = 'abcd' with open("test.bin", "wb") as file: file.write(somestring)
There is nothing magical about binary files; the only difference with a file opened in text mode is that a binary file will not automatically translate \n
newlines to the line separator standard for your platform; e.g. on Windows writing \n
produces \r\n
instead.
You certainly do not have to produce hexadecimal escapes to write binary data.
On Python 3 strings are Unicode data and cannot just be written to a file without encoding, but on Python the str
type is already encoded bytes. So on Python 3 you'd use:
somestring = 'abcd' with open("test.bin", "wb") as file: file.write(somestring.encode('ascii'))
or you'd use a byte string literal; b'abcd'
.