How to Convert a String to Binary in Python

1. Convert a String to Its Binary Representation in Python Using the format() Function
2. Convert a String to Its Binary Representation in Python Using the bytearray Method
3. Convert a String to Its Binary Representation in Python Using the map() Function
4. Convert a String to Its Binary Representation in Python Using the ASCII Method

When a string is converted to binary, it generates a list of binary values representing the original characters. Each character must be iterated over and converted to binary.

This article will discuss some methods to convert a string to its binary representation in Python.

Convert a String to Its Binary Representation in Python Using the format() Function

We use the ord() function that translates the Unicode point of the string to a corresponding integer. The format() function converts an integer to a number in base two using the b binary format.

The complete example code is given below.

string = "Python"
binary_converted = " ".join(format(ord(c), "b") for c in string)
print("The Binary Representation is:", binary_converted)

Output:

The Binary Represntation is: 1010000 1111001 1110100 1101000 1101111 1101110

Convert a String to Its Binary Representation in Python Using the bytearray Method

A byte array is a set of bytes that may store a list of binary data. Instead of iterating over the string explicitly, we can iterate over a byte sequence. It can be achieved without using the ord() function, but using the bytearray() function.

The complete example code is given below.

string = "Python"
binary_converted = " ".join(format(c, "b") for c in bytearray(string, "utf-8"))
print("The Binary Represntation is:", binary_converted)

Output:

The Binary Representation is: 1010000 1111001 1110100 1101000 1101111 1101110

Convert a String to Its Binary Representation in Python Using the map() Function

We can also use the map() function in replacement of the format() function. map() convert string to a byte array using the bytearray() function and then use bin to convert the array of bytes in binary representation.

The complete example code is given below.

string = "Python"
binary_converted = " ".join(map(bin, bytearray(string, "utf-8")))
print("The Binary Represntation is:", binary_converted)

In Python 3, we must define an encoding scheme like utf-8; otherwise, an error will be raised.

Output:

The Binary Represntation is: 0b1010000 0b1111001 0b1110100 0b1101000 0b1101111 0b1101110

Convert a String to Its Binary Representation in Python Using the ASCII Method

In Python 3, utf-8 is the default encoding scheme. But this method will use an ASCII encoding scheme instead of utf-8. For basic alphanumeric strings, the variations between UTF-8 and ASCII encoding are not noticeable. But they will become significant if we are processing text that incorporates characters that are not part of the ASCII character collection.

The complete example code is given below:

st = "Python"
a_bytes = bytes(st, "ascii")
binary_converted = " ".join(["{0:b}".format(x) for x in a_bytes])
print("The Binary Represntation is:", binary_converted)

Output:

The Binary Representation is: 1010000 1111001 1110100 1101000 1101111 1101110