How to read files as hex

Question

I want to to be able to be given an input file with any sort of extension and read it in as hex or binary, but in a string or something. Not like open(file_path, 'rb') in python. Preferably in python or JS.

Answer 1

Can use print() with "x" format to format a byte as 2-digit hex string. Use 'rb' file mode to open file in binary mode to process file stream as a sequence of bytes. You can read a block of data at a time then iterate over each block one byte at a time.

import sys

with open(sys.argv[1], 'rb') as fin:
    while True:
        data = fin.read(16)
        if len(data) == 0:
            break
        # iterate over each byte in byte sequence
        for b in data:
            print(' {:02x}'.format(b), end='')
        print()

If run code above on the source code then output would be a sequence of 16 hex numbers on each line.

Output:

69 6d 70 6f 72 74 20 73 79 73 0d 0a 0d 0a 77 69
74 68 20 6f 70 65 6e 28 73 79 73 2e 61 72 67 76
...
3d 27 27 29 0d 0a 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 70 72
69 6e 74 28 29 0d 0a

For example, the first line "import sys" is output as 69 6d 70 6f 72 74 20 73 79 73 followed by 0d 0a for CR LF characters.