Python Language Tutorial => encode/decode to hex no longer available

Example

Python 2.x2.7

"1deadbeef3".decode('hex')
# Out: '\x1d\xea\xdb\xee\xf3'
'\x1d\xea\xdb\xee\xf3'.encode('hex')
# Out: 1deadbeef3

Python 3.x3.0

"1deadbeef3".decode('hex')
# Traceback (most recent call last):
#   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
# AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

b"1deadbeef3".decode('hex')
# Traceback (most recent call last):
#   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
# LookupError: 'hex' is not a text encoding; use codecs.decode() to handle arbitrary codecs

'\x1d\xea\xdb\xee\xf3'.encode('hex')
# Traceback (most recent call last):
#   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
# LookupError: 'hex' is not a text encoding; use codecs.encode() to handle arbitrary codecs

b'\x1d\xea\xdb\xee\xf3'.encode('hex')
# Traceback (most recent call last):
#  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
# AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode'

However, as suggested by the error message, you can use the codecs module to achieve the same result:

import codecs
codecs.decode('1deadbeef4', 'hex')
# Out: b'\x1d\xea\xdb\xee\xf4'
codecs.encode(b'\x1d\xea\xdb\xee\xf4', 'hex')
# Out: b'1deadbeef4'

Note that codecs.encode returns a bytes object. To obtain a str object just decode to ASCII:

codecs.encode(b'\x1d\xea\xdb\xee\xff', 'hex').decode('ascii')
# Out: '1deadbeeff'

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Python Language Incompatibilities moving from Python 2 to Python 3 encode/decode to hex no longer available

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