How to convert string to byte array in Python

Question

Say that I have a 4 character string, and I want to convert this string into a byte array where each character in the string is translated into its hex equivalent. e.g.

str = "ABCD"

I'm trying to get my output to be

array('B', [41, 42, 43, 44])

Is there a straightforward way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

encode function can help you here, encode returns an encoded version of the string

In [44]: str = "ABCD"

In [45]: [elem.encode("hex") for elem in str]
Out[45]: ['41', '42', '43', '44']

or you can use array module

In [49]: import array

In [50]: print array.array('B', "ABCD")
array('B', [65, 66, 67, 68])