[Python-Dev] Readability of hex strings (Was: Use of coding cookie in 3.x stdlib) (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Tue Jul 27 02:12:43 CEST 2010

On Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:29:31 am anatoly techtonik wrote:

I find "\xXX\xXX\xXX\xXX..." notation for binary data totally unreadable. Everybody who uses and analyses binary data is more familiar with plain hex dumps in the form of "XX XX XX XX...".

I wonder if it is possible to introduce an effective binary string type that will be represented as h"XX XX XX" in language syntax? It will be much easier to analyze printed binary data and copy/paste such data as-is from hex editors/views.

With the moratorium on new language features, this would not even be considered until Python 3.3.

If you are serious in pursuing this idea, it is off-topic for this list and should be taken to python-ideas, or even python-list for community feedback, first.

Since it only takes a pair of small helper functions to convert hex dumps in the form "XXXX XXXX ..." to and from byte strings, I don't see the need for new syntax and would vote -1 on the idea. However, I'd vote +0 on a matching bytes.tohex() method to partner with the existing bytes.fromhex().

-- Steven D'Aprano

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