Ascii to binary conversion

[John Machin]

On Aug 9, 11:18 pm, azrael <jura.gro... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hy folks,
>
> I googled, and searched, and can not bealive that I have not found a
> built in way to convert the easy and elegant python way a function to
> easily convert simple ascii data to binary and back.
>
> I've written some my own but they were pretty slow using binascii
> linbrary with hexifly and unhexifly functions conbined with a
> lookuptable of binary and hex values.
>
> Any idea how to easily write a function that recieves a character or
> string and returns a binary number like:
> ascii("1") is converted to bin("00110001")

Here's one way:

>>> def a2b(a):
...    ai = ord(a)
...    return ''.join('01'[(ai >> x) & 1] for x in xrange(7, -1, -1))
...
>>> a2b('1')
'00110001'
>>> a2b('2')
'00110010'
>>> a2b(chr(0))
'00000000'
>>> a2b(chr(255))
'11111111'
>>>

BUT ... why are you doing this so much that the speed matters???