Python | Convert String to Binary

Data conversion have always been widely used utility and one among them can be conversion of a string to it’s binary equivalent. Let’s discuss certain ways in which this can be done. 

Method #1 : Using join() + ord() + format() The combination of above functions can be used to perform this particular task. The ord function converts the character to it’s ASCII equivalent, format converts this to binary number and join is used to join each converted character to form a string. 

The original string is : Lazyroar
The string after binary conversion : 01000111011001010110010101101011011100110110011001101111011100100100011101100101011001010110101101110011

Time Complexity: O(N) where N is the lenght of the input string.

Auxiliary Space: O(N)

Method #2 : Using join() + bytearray() + format() This method is almost similar to the above function. The difference here is that rather than converting the character to it’s ASCII using ord function, the conversion at once of string is done by bytearray function. 

The original string is : Lazyroar
The string after binary conversion : 01000111011001010110010101101011011100110110011001101111011100100100011101100101011001010110101101110011

Method #3 : Using join() + bin() + zfill() 

we define a function str_to_binary(string) that takes in a string as its input.

We then create an empty list called binary_list, which will be used to store the binary conversions of each character in the input string.

We then use a for loop to iterate through each character in the input string. For each character, we use the ord() function to convert it to its ASCII equivalent, and then use the bin() function to convert that integer to a binary string. The bin() function returns a string with a ‘0b’ prefix, so we use list slicing to remove that prefix.

After that we use the zfill(8) method to pad the binary conversion with leading zeroes until it reaches a length of 8. The zfill() method pads the string on the left with a specified character (in this case, ‘0’) until it reaches the desired length.

Then we append the binary conversion to the binary_list and after that we join all the binary values in the list and return as a single string by using join() method.

Finally, we test the function with an example input of the string “Lazyroar”. The function returns the binary string representation of the input string.

01000111011001010110010101101011011100110110011001101111011100100100011101100101011001010110101101110011

Time complexity: O(n), where n is the length of the input string.

Auxiliary Space: O(n), as we store each binary conversion in a list.

Method 4 : Using the binascii module.

Step-by-step approach:

• Import the binascii module.
• Initialize the string you want to convert to binary.
• Use the binascii.hexlify() function to convert the string to hexadecimal format.
• Use the binascii.unhexlify() function to convert the hexadecimal string to binary format.
• Decode the binary format using the .decode() method and store the result in a variable.
• Print the original string and the binary format.

The original string is: Lazyroar
The string after binary conversion: 01000111011001010110010101101011011100110110011001101111011100100100011101100101011001010110101101110011

Time complexity: O(n) 
Auxiliary space: O(n).