I'm writing a hex viewer on python for examining raw packet bytes. I use dpkt module.
I supposed that one hex byte may have value between 0x00 and 0xFF. However, I've noticed that python bytes representation looks differently:
b'\x8a\n\x1e+\x1f\x84V\xf2\xca$\xb1' I don't understand what do these symbols mean. How can I translate these symbols to original 1-byte values which could be shown in hex viewer?
The \xhh indicates a hex value of hh. i.e. it is the Python 3 way of encoding 0xhh.
See https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-and-bytes-literals
The b at the start of the string is an indication that the variables should be of bytes type rather than str. The above link also covers that. The \n is a newline character.
You can use bytearray to store and access the data. Here's an example using the byte string in your question.
example_bytes = b'\x8a\n\x1e+\x1f\x84V\xf2\xca$\xb1' encoded_array = bytearray(example_bytes) print(encoded_array) >>> bytearray(b'\x8a\n\x1e+\x1f\x84V\xf2\xca$\xb1') # Print the value of \x8a which is 138 in decimal. print(encoded_array[0]) >>> 138 # Encode value as Hex. print(hex(encoded_array[0])) >>> 0x8a Hope this helps.
