Encoding method in python not working

Question

Got a problem with encoding process.

 def str2bin(message):
 binary = bin(int(binascii.hexlify(message), 16))
 return binary[2:]

The error is :

binary = bin(int(binascii.hexlify(message), 16)) TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'

I'm trying to type only ascii in a program. What is causing the error?

• Mark Dickinson: It's not clear what your title has to do with your question. Did you mean "steganography" rather than "stenography"? (Even then, it's still not clear.)

Answer 1

You need to encode the string, either in your function or before you pass it to your function:

import binascii
def str2bin(message):
 binary = bin(int(binascii.hexlify(message.encode("ascii")), 16))
 return binary[2:]
print(str2bin("X")) # 1011000

The reason is, that hexlify expects a data type that supports the buffer interface.

A bytes-like object does, a str does not.

See also the note on the binascii docs:

a2b_* functions accept Unicode strings containing only ASCII characters. Other functions only accept bytes-like objects (such as bytes, bytearray and other objects that support the buffer protocol).