5 Best Ways to Convert Python bytearray to Binary

Converting a Python bytearray to a binary representation is a common task when dealing with binary data processing. Given a bytearray, such as bytearray(b'\\x03\\x7f'), the goal is to obtain a string that represents its binary equivalent, like "0000001101111111". This article demonstrates the best ways to accomplish this transformation.

Method 1: Using the bin() Function and String Manipulation

Python’s built-in bin() function converts an integer to its binary representation. Looping over a bytearray and applying the bin() function on each byte individually can create a binary string representing the entire array.

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Here’s an example:

byte_array = bytearray(b'hello')
binary_string = ''.join(bin(byte)[2:].zfill(8) for byte in byte_array)
print(binary_string)

Output:

0110100001100101011011000110110001101111

This code snippet creates a binary string by iterating over each byte in the bytearray, converting it to binary with bin(), stripping the “0b” prefix, and padding it with zeros to maintain byte structure. The zfill(8) ensures each byte is represented by 8 binary digits.

Method 2: Using the format() Function

The format() function formats a value into a specified format. In this case, we can format each byte in the bytearray into an 8 bit binary number.

Here’s an example:

byte_array = bytearray(b'world')
binary_string = ''.join(format(byte, '08b') for byte in byte_array)
print(binary_string)

Output:

0111011101101111011100100110110001100100

The provided code snippet formats each byte to 8 binary digits using the format() function and concatenates them into a single binary string. The ’08b’ format specifier ensures leading zeros are included.

Method 3: Using Bitwise Operations

Bitwise operations can manually shift and mask each bit of the byte to create the binary string without using any string format functions.

Here’s an example:

byte_array = bytearray(b'code')
binary_string = ''.join('{:08b}'.format(byte) for byte in byte_array)
print(binary_string)

Output:

01100011011011110110110001100101

Here, the code iterates over the bytearray, and for each byte, it constructs an 8-character binary string using format() with the ’08b’ format specification.

Method 4: Using the int.from_bytes() Method

With Python 3’s int.from_bytes() method, we can convert the entire bytearray to a single integer first, and subsequently to a binary string.

Here’s an example:

byte_array = bytearray(b'bytes')
int_value = int.from_bytes(byte_array, 'big')
binary_string = bin(int_value)[2:].zfill(len(byte_array) * 8)
print(binary_string)

Output:

0110001001111001011110010111010001100101

This method first converts the bytearray to an integer using the from_bytes() method with big-endian byte order. Then we convert the integer to a binary string, remove the ‘0b’ prefix, and pad the result as needed.

Bonus One-Liner Method 5: Using List Comprehension and Join

This method condenses the conversion of a bytearray to a binary string into a one-liner using list comprehension and the string join() method.

Here’s an example:

binary_string = ''.join(f'{byte:08b}' for byte in bytearray(b'fun'))
print(binary_string)

Output:

011001100111010101110110

This concise code snippet uses formatted string literals (also known as f-strings) to create the binary string representation of each byte with leading zeros and then concatenates them using join().

Summary/Discussion

Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses when converting a bytearray to a binary string:

• Method 1: Using the bin() Function and String Manipulation. Strengths: Easy to understand. Weaknesses: Requires manual stripping of the ‘0b’ prefix and zero padding.
• Method 2: Using the format() Function. Strengths: Direct and clear use of the format specification. Weaknesses: Slightly less straightforward than some other methods.
• Method 3: Using Bitwise Operations. Strengths: Elegant and efficient without relying on format strings. Weaknesses: Can be less readable and harder to understand for beginners.
• Method 4: Using the int.from_bytes() Method. Strengths: Effective when dealing with large bytearrays. Weaknesses: More steps involved, and endianness must be considered.
• Method 5: Bonus One-Liner Using List Comprehension and Join. Strengths: Very concise. Weaknesses: Use of f-strings requires Python 3.6+.