How to Convert a String from Hex to ASCII in Python

John on April 27, 2021

In this tutorial, we will learn how to convert a hexadecimal string from its base-16 encoding into its ASCII representation.

To do this we will need to perform two operations. The first is to create a bytes object from the hex string using the Python bytes.fromhex() function and convert that object into an ASCII string using the Python .decode() function.

hex_str = '68656c6c6f'

bytes_obj = bytes.fromhex(hex_str)

ascii_str = bytes_obj.decode('ASCII')

print(ascii_str)

hello

If there is a 0x at the start of your hex string slice it away like this:

hex_str = '0x68656c6c6f'[2:]

bytes_obj = bytes.fromhex(hex_str)

ascii_str = bytes_obj.decode('ASCII')

print(ascii_str)

hello