Format ints into string of hex

Solution 1:

Just for completeness, using the modern .format() syntax:

>>> numbers = [1, 15, 255]
>>> ''.join('{:02X}'.format(a) for a in numbers)
'010FFF'

Solution 2:

''.join('%02x'%i for i in input)

Solution 3:

Python 2:

>>> str(bytearray([0,1,2,3,127,200,255])).encode('hex')
'000102037fc8ff'

Python 3:

>>> bytearray([0,1,2,3,127,200,255]).hex()
'000102037fc8ff'

Solution 4:

The most recent and in my opinion preferred approach is the f-string:

''.join(f'{i:02x}' for i in [1, 15, 255])

Format options

The old format style was the %-syntax:

['%02x'%i for i in [1, 15, 255]]

The more modern approach is the .format method:

 ['{:02x}'.format(i) for i in [1, 15, 255]]

More recently, from python 3.6 upwards we were treated to the f-string syntax:

[f'{i:02x}' for i in [1, 15, 255]]

Format syntax

Note that the f'{i:02x}' works as follows.

• The first part before : is the input or variable to format.
• The x indicates that the string should be hex. f'{100:02x}' is '64', f'{100:02d}' (decimal) is '100' and f'{100:02b}' (binary) is '1100100'.
• The 02 indicates that the string should be left-filled with 0's to minimum length 2. f'{100:02x}' is '64' and f'{100:30x}' is ' 64'.

Solution 5:

Yet another option is binascii.hexlify:

a = [0,1,2,3,127,200,255]
print binascii.hexlify(bytes(bytearray(a)))

prints

000102037fc8ff

This is also the fastest version for large strings on my machine.

In Python 2.7 or above, you could improve this even more by using

binascii.hexlify(memoryview(bytearray(a)))

saving the copy created by the bytes call.