[Tutor] convert ascii to binary

[eryksun]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Aaron Pilgrim <aaronpil at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> I am trying to write a small program that converts ascii to binary.
>
> I tried using the python reference library section 18.8 but had
> trouble understanding how to make it work.
>
>  Here is the code I am currently trying to use:
>
> def main():
>         import binascii
>         myWord = input("Enter the word to convert..")
>         #convert text to ascii
>         for ch in myWord:
>                 print(ord(ch))
>                 #convert ascii to binary
>                 binascii.a2b_uu(ord(ch))


I'm not sure what you want, based on the code above. uuencoding is
meant for sending data through 7-bit channels like email and
newsgroups. For example:

    >>> binascii.b2a_uu('\x81\x82')  # 8-bit binary to 7-bit ascii
    '"@8( \n'
    >>> binascii.a2b_uu('"@8( \n')   # 7-bit ascii back to 8-bit
    '\x81\x82'

http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/binascii.html#binascii.a2b_uu

Do you instead want an ASCII bitstring (i.e. 1s and 0s)?

These will raise a UnicodeError if the string isn't ASCII.

    # Python 3
    def iter_bin(s):
        sb = s.encode('ascii')
        return (format(b, '07b') for b in sb)

    # Python 2
    def iter_bin(s):
        sb = s.encode('ascii')
        return (format(ord(b), '07b') for b in sb)

For example:

    >>> for s in iter_bin("Spam"):
    ...   print(s)
    ...
    1010011
    1110000
    1100001
    1101101

    >>> print(*iter_bin("Spam"), sep='')  # Python 3
    1010011111000011000011101101

    >>> print ''.join(s for s in iter_bin("Spam")) # Python 2
    1010011111000011000011101101