How to convert an int to a hex string?

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I want to take an integer (that will be <= 255), to a hex string representation

e.g.: I want to pass in 65 and get out '\x41', or 255 and get '\xff'.

I've tried doing this with the struct.pack('c',65), but that chokes on anything above 9 since it wants to take in a single character string.

14 Answers

You are looking for the chr function.

You seem to be mixing decimal representations of integers and hex representations of integers, so it's not entirely clear what you need. Based on the description you gave, I think one of these snippets shows what you want.

>>> chr(0x65) == '\x65'
True


>>> hex(65)
'0x41'
>>> chr(65) == '\x41'
True

Note that this is quite different from a string containing an integer as hex. If that is what you want, use the hex builtin.

This will convert an integer to a 2 digit hex string with the 0x prefix:

strHex = "0x%0.2X" % integerVariable

What about hex()?

hex(255)  # 0xff

If you really want to have \ in front you can do:

print '\\' + hex(255)[1:]

Let me add this one, because sometimes you just want the single digit representation

( x can be lower, 'x', or uppercase, 'X', the choice determines if the output letters are upper or lower.):

'{:x}'.format(15)
> f

And now with the new f'' format strings you can do:

f'{15:x}'
> f

To add 0 padding you can use 0>n:

f'{2034:0>4X}'
> 07F2

NOTE: the initial 'f' in f'{15:x}' is to signify a format string

With format(), as per format-examples, we can do:

>>> # format also supports binary numbers
>>> "int: {0:d};  hex: {0:x};  oct: {0:o};  bin: {0:b}".format(42)
'int: 42;  hex: 2a;  oct: 52;  bin: 101010'
>>> # with 0x, 0o, or 0b as prefix:
>>> "int: {0:d};  hex: {0:#x};  oct: {0:#o};  bin: {0:#b}".format(42)
'int: 42;  hex: 0x2a;  oct: 0o52;  bin: 0b101010'

Note that for large values, hex() still works (some other answers don't):

x = hex(349593196107334030177678842158399357)
print(x)

Python 2: 0x4354467b746f6f5f736d616c6c3f7dL
Python 3: 0x4354467b746f6f5f736d616c6c3f7d

For a decrypted RSA message, one could do the following:

import binascii

hexadecimals = hex(349593196107334030177678842158399357)

print(binascii.unhexlify(hexadecimals[2:-1])) # python 2
print(binascii.unhexlify(hexadecimals[2:])) # python 3

For Python >= 3.6, use f-string formatting:

>>> x = 114514
>>> f'{x:0x}'
'1bf52'
>>> f'{x:#x}'
'0x1bf52'
(int_variable).to_bytes(bytes_length, byteorder='big'|'little').hex()

For example:

>>> (434).to_bytes(4, byteorder='big').hex()
'000001b2'
>>> (434).to_bytes(4, byteorder='little').hex()
'b2010000'

Also you can convert any number in any base to hex. Use this one line code here it's easy and simple to use:

hex(int(n,x)).replace("0x","")

You have a string n that is your number and x the base of that number. First, change it to integer and then to hex but hex has 0x at the first of it so with replace we remove it.

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