Question

I need to print out a string of binary escape sequences, e.g. \x05\x03\x87, exactly as they appear. When I try to print them, Python returns a string of weird non-ASCII characters. How can I print them as a string literal?

Answer 1

repr

>>> a='\x05\x03\x87'
>>> print a
?
>>> print repr(a)
'\x05\x03\x87'

EDIT

Sven makes the point that the OP might want every character dumped in hex, even the printable ones, in which case, the best solution I can think of is:

>>> print ''.join(map(lambda c:'\\x%02x'%c, map(ord, a)))
\x05\x03\x87

ADDITIONAL EDIT

Four years later, it occurs to me that this might be both faster and more readable:

>>> print ''.join(map(lambda c:'\\x%02x'% ord(c), a))

or even

>>> print ''.join([ '\\x%02x'% ord(c) for c in a ])