This snippet defines a function a2bits which converts a characters string to a string of 0's and 1's showing its bitwise representation.
String to Bits
import sys
if sys.version_info[0] >= 3:
bin = "{0:#0b}".format
from functools import reduce
def a2bits(chars):
"Convert a string to its bits representation as a string of 0's and 1's"
return bin(reduce(lambda x, y : (x<<8)+y, (ord(c) for c in chars), 1))[3:]
Gribouillis 1,391 Programming Explorer Team Colleague
Here is a much faster version using binascii.hexlify:
from binascii import hexlify
def a2bits(bytes):
"""Convert a sequence of bytes to its bits representation as a string of 0's and 1's
This function needs python >= 2.6"""
return bin(int(b"1" + hexlify(bytes), 16))[3:] Gribouillis 1,391 Programming Explorer Team Colleague
Another possibility is to use a specialized module to handle binary data. One such module is bitstring (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bitstring). Install it with easy_install or pip. Example:
>>> from bitstring import BitString
>>> bs = BitString(bytes="hello world")
>>> bs
BitStream('0x68656c6c6f20776f726c64')
>>> bs.bin
'0b0110100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000111011101101111011100100110110001100100'
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