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split python bytearray character by character

So, I've got some python code
string = "Python is interesting."
arr = bytearray(string, 'utf-8')
arr.split(b'\'')
which I adapted from Split String by char Character
but it returns a
[bytearray(b'Python is interesting.')]
I was hoping to split it byte-by-byte. The end goal is to pass this to a C++ boost wrapper which expects an array of bytes character-by-character. I'm using a bytearray because I'm actually working with sockets and for a given large message I want to accumulate them.
expected_length = _get_obj_size(socket)
running_length = 0
accumulator = bytearray(b'')
while running_length < expected_length:
msg = socket.recv(BUFFER_SIZE)
if msg:
running_length += len(msg)
accumulator += msg
logger.debug("Finished reading in payload")
^ the above isn't particularly relevant but I felt like it might be useful to show why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Taking the hint from #Epsi95 what about:
[chr(x) for x in list(arr)]

How to decode a string representation of a bytes object?

I have a string which includes encoded bytes inside it:
str1 = "b'Output file \xeb\xac\xb8\xed\x95\xad\xeb\xb6\x84\xec\x84\x9d.xlsx Created'"
I want to decode it, but I can't since it has become a string. Therefore I want to ask whether there is any way I can convert it into
str2 = b'Output file \xeb\xac\xb8\xed\x95\xad\xeb\xb6\x84\xec\x84\x9d.xlsx Created'
Here str2 is a bytes object which I can decode easily using
str2.decode('utf-8')
to get the final result:
'Output file 문항분석.xlsx Created'

You could use ast.literal_eval:
>>> print(str1)
b'Output file \xeb\xac\xb8\xed\x95\xad\xeb\xb6\x84\xec\x84\x9d.xlsx Created'
>>> type(str1)
<class 'str'>
>>> from ast import literal_eval
>>> literal_eval(str1).decode('utf-8')
'Output file 문항분석.xlsx Created'

Based on the SyntaxError mentioned in your comments, you may be having a testing issue when attempting to print due to the fact that stdout is set to ascii in your console (and you may also find that your console does not support some of the characters you may be trying to print). You can try something like the following to set sys.stdout to utf-8 and see what your console will print (just using string slice and encode below to get bytes rather than the ast.literal_eval approach that has already been suggested):
import codecs
import sys
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(sys.stdout.buffer)
s = "b'Output file \xeb\xac\xb8\xed\x95\xad\xeb\xb6\x84\xec\x84\x9d.xlsx Created'"
b = s[2:-1].encode().decode('utf-8')

A simple way is to assume that all the characters of the initial strings are in the [0,256) range and map to the same Unicode value, which means that it is a Latin1 encoded string.
The conversion is then trivial:
str1[2:-1].encode('Latin1').decode('utf8')

Finally I have found an answer where i use a function to cast a string to bytes without encoding.Given string
str1 = "b'Output file \xeb\xac\xb8\xed\x95\xad\xeb\xb6\x84\xec\x84\x9d.xlsx Created'"
now i take only actual encoded text inside of it
str1[2:-1]
and pass this to the function which convert the string to bytes without encoding its values
import struct
def rawbytes(s):
"""Convert a string to raw bytes without encoding"""
outlist = []
for cp in s:
num = ord(cp)
if num < 255:
outlist.append(struct.pack('B', num))
elif num < 65535:
outlist.append(struct.pack('>H', num))
else:
b = (num & 0xFF0000) >> 16
H = num & 0xFFFF
outlist.append(struct.pack('>bH', b, H))
return b''.join(outlist)
So, calling the function would convert it to bytes which then is decoded
rawbytes(str1[2:-1]).decode('utf-8')
will give the correct output
'Output file 문항분석.xlsx Created'

Read Null terminated string in python

I'm trying to read a null terminated string but i'm having issues when unpacking a char and putting it together with a string.
This is the code:
def readString(f):
str = ''
while True:
char = readChar(f)
str = str.join(char)
if (hex(ord(char))) == '0x0':
break
return str
def readChar(f):
char = unpack('c',f.read(1))[0]
return char
Now this is giving me this error:
TypeError: sequence item 0: expected str instance, int found
I'm also trying the following:
char = unpack('c',f.read(1)).decode("ascii")
But it throws me:
AttributeError: 'tuple' object has no attribute 'decode'
I don't even know how to read the chars and add it to the string, Is there any proper way to do this?

Here's a version that (ab)uses __iter__'s lesser-known "sentinel" argument:
with open('file.txt', 'rb') as f:
val = ''.join(iter(lambda: f.read(1).decode('ascii'), '\x00'))

How about:
myString = myNullTerminatedString.split("\x00")[0]
For example:
myNullTerminatedString = "hello world\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00"
myString = myNullTerminatedString.split("\x00")[0]
print(myString) # "hello world"
This works by splitting the string on the null character. Since the string should terminate at the first null character, we simply grab the first item in the list after splitting. split will return a list of one item if the delimiter doesn't exist, so it still works even if there's no null terminator at all.
It also will work with byte strings:
myByteString = b'hello world\x00'
myStr = myByteString.split(b'\x00')[0].decode('ascii') # "hello world" as normal string
If you're reading from a file, you can do a relatively larger read - estimate how much you'll need to read to find your null string. This is a lot faster than reading byte-by-byte. For example:
resultingStr = ''
while True:
buf = f.read(512)
resultingStr += buf
if len(buf)==0: break
if (b"\x00" in resultingStr):
extraBytes = resultingStr.index(b"\x00")
resultingStr = resultingStr.split(b"\x00")[0]
break
# now "resultingStr" contains the string
f.seek(0 - extraBytes,1) # seek backwards by the number of bytes, now the pointer will be on the null byte in the file
# or f.seek(1 - extraBytes,1) to skip the null byte in the file

(edit version 2, added extra way at the end)
Maybe there are some libraries out there that can help you with this, but as I don't know about them lets attack the problem at hand with what we know.
In python 2 bytes and string are basically the same thing, that change in python 3 where string is what in py2 is unicode and bytes is its own separate type, which mean that you don't need to define a read char if you are in py2 as no extra work is required, so I don't think you need that unpack function for this particular case, with that in mind lets define the new readString
def readString(myfile):
chars = []
while True:
c = myfile.read(1)
if c == chr(0):
return "".join(chars)
chars.append(c)
just like with your code I read a character one at the time but I instead save them in a list, the reason is that string are immutable so doing str+=char result in unnecessary copies; and when I find the null character return the join string. And chr is the inverse of ord, it will give you the character given its ascii value. This will exclude the null character, if its needed just move the appending...
Now lets test it with your sample file
for instance lets try to read "Sword_Wea_Dummy" from it
with open("sword.blendscn","rb") as archi:
#lets simulate that some prior processing was made by
#moving the pointer of the file
archi.seek(6)
string=readString(archi)
print "string repr:", repr(string)
print "string:", string
print ""
#and the rest of the file is there waiting to be processed
print "rest of the file: ", repr(archi.read())
and this is the output
string repr: 'Sword_Wea_Dummy'
string: Sword_Wea_Dummy
rest of the file: '\xcd\xcc\xcc=p=\x8a4:\xa66\xbfJ\x15\xc6=\x00\x00\x00\x00\xeaQ8?\x9e\x8d\x874$-i\xb3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x9b\xc6\xaa2K\x15\xc6=;\xa66?\x00\x00\x00\x00\xb8\x88\xbf#\x0e\xf3\xb1#ITuB\x00\x00\x80?\xcd\xcc\xcc=\x00\x00\x00\x00\xcd\xccL>'
other tests
>>> with open("sword.blendscn","rb") as archi:
print readString(archi)
print readString(archi)
print readString(archi)
sword
Sword_Wea_Dummy
ÍÌÌ=p=Š4:¦6¿JÆ=
>>> with open("sword.blendscn","rb") as archi:
print repr(readString(archi))
print repr(readString(archi))
print repr(readString(archi))
'sword'
'Sword_Wea_Dummy'
'\xcd\xcc\xcc=p=\x8a4:\xa66\xbfJ\x15\xc6='
>>>
Now that I think about it, you mention that the data portion is of fixed size, if that is true for all files and the structure on all of them is as follow
[unknow size data][know size data]
then that is a pattern we can exploit, we only need to know the size of the file and we can get both part smoothly as follow
import os
def getDataPair(filename,knowSize):
size = os.path.getsize(filename)
with open(filename, "rb") as archi:
unknown = archi.read(size-knowSize)
know = archi.read()
return unknown, know
and by knowing the size of the data portion, its use is simple (which I get by playing with the prior example)
>>> strins_data, data = getDataPair("sword.blendscn", 80)
>>> string_data, data = getDataPair("sword.blendscn", 80)
>>> string_data
'sword\x00Sword_Wea_Dummy\x00'
>>> data
'\xcd\xcc\xcc=p=\x8a4:\xa66\xbfJ\x15\xc6=\x00\x00\x00\x00\xeaQ8?\x9e\x8d\x874$-i\xb3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x9b\xc6\xaa2K\x15\xc6=;\xa66?\x00\x00\x00\x00\xb8\x88\xbf#\x0e\xf3\xb1#ITuB\x00\x00\x80?\xcd\xcc\xcc=\x00\x00\x00\x00\xcd\xccL>'
>>> string_data.split(chr(0))
['sword', 'Sword_Wea_Dummy', '']
>>>
Now to get each string a simple split will suffice and you can pass the rest of the file contained in data to the appropriated function to be processed

Doing file I/O one character at a time is horribly slow.
Instead use readline0, now on pypi: https://pypi.org/project/readline0/ . Or something like it.
In 3.x, there's a "newline" argument to open, but it doesn't appear to be as flexible as readline0.

Here is my implementation:
import struct
def read_null_str(f):
r_str = ""
while 1:
back_offset = f.tell()
try:
r_char = struct.unpack("c", f.read(1))[0].decode("utf8")
except:
f.seek(back_offset)
temp_char = struct.unpack("<H", f.read(2))[0]
r_char = chr(temp_char)
if ord(r_char) == 0:
return r_str
else:
r_str += r_char

Python: converting hex values, stored as string, to hex data

(Answer found. Close the topic)
I'm trying to convert hex values, stored as string, in to hex data.
I have:
data_input = 'AB688FB2509AA9D85C239B5DE16DD557D6477DEC23AF86F2AABD6D3B3E278FF9'
I need:
data_output = '\xAB\x68\x8F\xB2\x50\x9A\xA9\xD8\x5C\x23\x9B\x5D\xE1\x6D\xD5\x57\xD6\x47\x7D\xEC\x23\xAF\x86\xF2\xAA\xBD\x6D\x3B\x3E\x27\x8F\xF9'
I was trying data_input.decode('hex'), binascii.unhexlify(data_input) but all they return:
"\xabh\x8f\xb2P\x9a\xa9\xd8\\#\x9b]\xe1m\xd5W\xd6G}\xec#\xaf\x86\xf2\xaa\xbdm;>'\x8f\xf9"
What should I write to receive all bytes in '\xFF' view?
updating:
I need representation in '\xFF' view to write this data to a file (I'm opening file with 'wb') as:
«hЏІPљ©Ш\#›]бmХWЦG}м#Ї†тЄЅm;>'Џщ
update2
Sorry for bothering. An answer lies under my nose all the time:
data_output = data_input.decode('hex')
write_file(filename, data_output) #just opens a file 'wb', ant write a data in it
gives the same result as I need

I like chopping strings into fixed-width chunks using re.findall
print '\\x' + '\\x'.join(re.findall('.{2}', data_input))
If you want to actually convert the string into a list of ints, you can do that like this:
data = [int(x, 16) for x in re.findall('.{2}', data_input)]

It's an inefficient solution, but there's always:
flag = True
data_output = ''
for char in data_input:
if flag:
buffer = char
flag = False
else:
data_output = data_output + '\\x' + buffer + char
flag = True
EDIT HOPEFULLY THE LAST: Who knew I could mess up in so many different ways on that simple a loop? Should actually run now...

>>> int('0x10AFCC', 16)
1093580
>>> hex(1093580)
'0x10afcc'
So prepend your string with '0x' then do the above

Is this a sensible approach for an EBCDIC (CP500) to Latin-1 converter?

I have to convert a number of large files (up to 2GB) of EBCDIC 500 encoded files to Latin-1. Since I could only find EBCDIC to ASCII converters (dd, recode) and the files contain some additional proprietary character codes, I thought I'd write my own converter.
I have the character mapping so I'm interested in the technical aspects.
This is my approach so far:
# char mapping lookup table
EBCDIC_TO_LATIN1 = {
0xC1:'41', # A
0xC2:'42', # B
# and so on...
}
BUFFER_SIZE = 1024 * 64
ebd_file = file(sys.argv[1], 'rb')
latin1_file = file(sys.argv[2], 'wb')
buffer = ebd_file.read(BUFFER_SIZE)
while buffer:
latin1_file.write(ebd2latin1(buffer))
buffer = ebd_file.read(BUFFER_SIZE)
ebd_file.close()
latin1_file.close()
This is the function that does the converting:
def ebd2latin1(ebcdic):
result = []
for ch in ebcdic:
result.append(EBCDIC_TO_LATIN1[ord(ch)])
return ''.join(result).decode('hex')
The question is whether or not this is a sensible approach from an engineering standpoint. Does it have some serious design issues? Is the buffer size OK? And so on...
As for the "proprietary characters" that some don't believe in: Each file contains a year's worth of patent documents in SGML format. The patent office has been using EBCDIC until they switched to Unicode in 2005. So there are thousands of documents within each file. They are separated by some hex values that are not part of any IBM specification. They were added by the patent office. Also, at the beginning of each file there are a few digits in ASCII that tell you about the length of the file. I don't really need that information but if I want to process the file so I have to deal with them.
Also:
$ recode IBM500/CR-LF..Latin1 file.ebc
recode: file.ebc failed: Ambiguous output in step `CR-LF..data'
Thanks for the help so far.

EBCDIC 500, aka Code Page 500, is amongst Pythons encodings, although you link to cp1047, which doesn't. Which one are you using, really? Anyway this works for cp500 (or any other encoding that you have).
from __future__ import with_statement
import sys
from contextlib import nested
BUFFER_SIZE = 16384
with nested(open(sys.argv[1], 'rb'), open(sys.argv[2], 'wb')) as (infile, outfile):
while True:
buffer = infile.read(BUFFER_SIZE)
if not buffer:
break
outfile.write(buffer.decode('cp500').encode('latin1'))
This way you shouldn't need to keep track of the mappings yourself.

If you set up the table correctly, then you just need to do:
translated_chars = ebcdic.translate(EBCDIC_TO_LATIN1)
where ebcdic contains EBCDIC characters and EBCDIC_TO_LATIN1 is a 256-char string which maps each EBCDIC character to its Latin-1 equivalent. The characters in EBCDIC_TO_LATIN1 are the actual binary values rather than their hex representations. For example, if you are using code page 500, the first 16 bytes of EBCDIC_TO_LATIN1 would be
'\x00\x01\x02\x03\x37\x2D\x2E\x2F\x16\x05\x25\x0B\x0C\x0D\x0E\x0F'
using this reference.

While this might not help the original poster anymore, some time ago I released a package for Python 2.6+ and 3.2+ that adds most of the western 8 bit mainframe codecs including CP1047 (French) and CP1141 (German): https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ebcdic. Simply import ebcdic to add the codecs and then use open(..., encoding='cp1047') to read or write files.

Answer 1:
Yet another silly question: What gave you the impression that recode produced only ASCII as output? AFAICT it will transcode ANY of its repertoire of charsets to ANY of its repertoire, AND its repertoire includes IBM cp500 and cp1047, and OF COURSE latin1. Reading the comments, you will note that Lennaert and I have discovered that there aren't any "proprietary" codes in those two IBM character sets. So you may well be able to use recode after all, once you are certain what charset you've actually got.
Answer 2:
If you really need/want to transcode IBM cp1047 via Python, you might like to firstly get the mapping from an authoritative source, processing it via script with some checks:
URL = "http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/data/trunk/charset/data/ucm/glibc-IBM1047-2.1.2.ucm"
"""
Sample lines:
<U0000> \x00 |0
<U0001> \x01 |0
<U0002> \x02 |0
<U0003> \x03 |0
<U0004> \x37 |0
<U0005> \x2D |0
"""
import urllib, re
text = urllib.urlopen(URL).read()
regex = r"<U([0-9a-fA-F]{4,4})>\s+\\x([0-9a-fA-F]{2,2})\s"
results = re.findall(regex, text)
wlist = [None] * 256
for result in results:
unum, inum = [int(x, 16) for x in result]
assert wlist[inum] is None
assert 0 <= unum <= 255
wlist[inum] = chr(unum)
assert not any(x is None for x in wlist)
print repr(''.join(wlist))
Then carefully copy/paste the output into your transcoding script for use with Vinay's buffer.translate(the_mapping) idea, with a buffer size perhaps a bit larger than 16KB and certainly a bit smaller than 2GB :-)

No crystal ball, no info from OP, so had a bit of a rummage in the EPO website. Found freely downloadable weekly patent info files, still available in cp500/SGML even though website says this to be replaced by utf8/XML in 2006 :-). Got the 2009 week 27 file. Is a zip containing 2 files s350927[ab].bin. "bin" means "not XML". Got the spec! Looks possible that "proprietary codes" are actually BINARY fields. Each record has a fixed 252-byte header. First 5 bytes are record length in EBCDIC e.g. hex F0F2F2F0F8 -> 2208 bytes. Last 2 bytes of the fixed header are the BINARY length (redundant) of the following variable part. In the middle are several text fields, two 2-byte binary fields, and one 4-byte binary field. The binary fields are serial numbers within groups, but all I saw are 1. The variable part is SGML.
Example (last record from s350927b.bin):
Record number: 7266
pprint of header text and binary slices:
['EPB102055619 TXT00000001',
1,
' 20090701200927 08013627.8 EP20090528NN ',
1,
1,
' T *lots of spaces snipped*']
Edited version of the rather long SGML:
<PATDOC FILE="08013627.8" CY=EP DNUM=2055619 KIND=B1 DATE=20090701 STATUS=N>
*snip*
<B541>DE<B542>Windschutzeinheit für ein Motorrad
<B541>EN<B542>Windshield unit for saddle-ride type vehicle
<B541>FR<B542>Unité pare-brise pour motocyclette</B540>
*snip*
</PATDOC>
There are no header or trailer records, just this one record format.
So: if the OP's annual files are anything like this, we might be able to help him out.
Update: Above was the "2 a.m. in my timezone" version. Here's a bit more info:
OP said: "at the beginning of each file there are a few digits in ASCII that tell you about the length of the file." ... translate that to "at the beginning of each record there are five digits in EBCDIC that tell you exactly the length of the record" and we have a (very fuzzy) match!
Here is the URL of the documentation page: http://docs.epoline.org/ebd/info.htm
The FIRST file mentioned is the spec.
Here is the URL of the download-weekly-data page: http://ebd2.epoline.org/jsp/ebdst35.jsp
An observation: The data that I looked at is in the ST.35 series. There is also available for download ST.32 which appears to be a parallel version containing only the SGML content (in "reduced cp437/850", one tag per line). This indicates that the fields in the fixed-length header of the ST.35 records may not be very interesting, and can thus be skipped over, which would greatly simplify the transcoding task.
For what it's worth, here is my (investigatory, written after midnight) code:
[Update 2: tidied up the code a little; no functionality changes]
from pprint import pprint as pp
import sys
from struct import unpack
HDRSZ = 252
T = '>s' # text
H = '>H' # binary 2 bytes
I = '>I' # binary 4 bytes
hdr_defn = [
6, T,
38, H,
40, T,
94, I,
98, H,
100, T,
251, H, # length of following SGML text
HDRSZ + 1
]
# above positions as per spec, reduce to allow for counting from 1
for i in xrange(0, len(hdr_defn), 2):
hdr_defn[i] -= 1
def records(fname, output_encoding='latin1', debug=False):
xlator=''.join(chr(i).decode('cp500').encode(output_encoding, 'replace') for i in range(256))
# print repr(xlator)
def xlate(ebcdic):
return ebcdic.translate(xlator)
# return ebcdic.decode('cp500') # use this if unicode output desired
f = open(fname, 'rb')
recnum = -1
while True:
# get header
buff = f.read(HDRSZ)
if not buff:
return # EOF
recnum += 1
if debug: print "\nrecnum", recnum
assert len(buff) == HDRSZ
recsz = int(xlate(buff[:5]))
if debug: print "recsz", recsz
# split remainder of header into text and binary pieces
fields = []
for i in xrange(0, len(hdr_defn) - 2, 2):
ty = hdr_defn[i + 1]
piece = buff[hdr_defn[i]:hdr_defn[i+2]]
if ty == T:
fields.append(xlate(piece))
else:
fields.append(unpack(ty, piece)[0])
if debug: pp(fields)
sgmlsz = fields.pop()
if debug: print "sgmlsz: %d; expected: %d - %d = %d" % (sgmlsz, recsz, HDRSZ, recsz - HDRSZ)
assert sgmlsz == recsz - HDRSZ
# get sgml part
sgml = f.read(sgmlsz)
assert len(sgml) == sgmlsz
sgml = xlate(sgml)
if debug: print "sgml", sgml
yield recnum, fields, sgml
if __name__ == "__main__":
maxrecs = int(sys.argv[1]) # dumping out the last `maxrecs` records in the file
fname = sys.argv[2]
keep = [None] * maxrecs
for recnum, fields, sgml in records(fname):
# do something useful here
keep[recnum % maxrecs] = (recnum, fields, sgml)
keep.sort()
for k in keep:
if k:
recnum, fields, sgml = k
print
print recnum
pp(fields)
print sgml

Assuming cp500 contains all of your "additional propietary characters", a more concise version based on Lennart's answer using the codecs module:
import sys, codecs
BUFFER_SIZE = 64*1024
ebd_file = codecs.open(sys.argv[1], 'r', 'cp500')
latin1_file = codecs.open(sys.argv[2], 'w', 'latin1')
buffer = ebd_file.read(BUFFER_SIZE)
while buffer:
latin1_file.write(buffer)
buffer = ebd_file.read(BUFFER_SIZE)
ebd_file.close()
latin1_file.close()