Question

Hello I have python sniffer

def receiveData(s):
    data = ''
    try:
        data = s.recvfrom(65565)
        #k = data.rstrip()
    except timeout:
        data = ''
    except:
        print "An Error Occurred."
        sys.exc_info()
    return data[0]

 data = receiveData(s)

s is socket. Im getting data but it contains symbols please help me somebody how i can convert it into plain text

Im newbie in Python and if its very silly question sorry : )

this is data example E\x00\x00)\x1a*@\x00\x80\x06L\xfd\xc0\xa8\x01\x84\xad\xc2#\xb9M\xb8\x00P\xed\xb3\x19\xd9\xedY\xc1\xfbP\x10\x01\x04\x16=\x00\x00\x00'

Answer 1

You can’t really convert it to “plain text”. Characters such as the NUL (ASCII 0, shown as \x00) can’t be displayed so python shows them in their hex representation.

What most sniffing/hexdump tools do is to replace unprintable characters with e.g. a dot. You could do it like this:

import string
printable = set(string.printable)
print ''.join(x if x in printable else '.' for x in data)

Example:

>>> data = 'E\x00\x00)\x1a*@\x00\x80\x06L\xfd\xc0\xa8\x01\x84\xad\xc2#\xb9M\xb8\x00P\xed\xb3\x19\xd9\xedY\xc1\xfbP\x10\x01\x04\x16=\x00\x00\x00'
>>> print ''.join(x if x in printable else '.' for x in data)
E..).*@...L.......#.M..P.....Y..P....=...