Convert from mac address to hex string and vice versa - both python 2 and 3
Question: I have MAC address that I want to send to dpkt as raw data. dpkt package
expect me to pass the data as hex stings. So, assuming I have the following
mac address: `'00:de:34:ef:2e:f4'`, written as: `'00de34ef2ef4'` and I want to
encode in to something like `'\x00\xdeU\xef.\xf4'` and the backward
translation will provide the original data.

On Python 2, I found couple of ways to do that using `encode('hex')` and
decode('hex'). However this solution isn't working for Python 3.

I'm haveng some trouble finding a code-snippet to support that on both
versions.

I'd appriciate help on this.

Thanks


Answer: [`binascii`
module](https://docs.python.org/3/library/binascii.html#binascii.hexlify)
works on both Python 2 and 3:

    
    
    >>> import binascii
    >>> binascii.unhexlify('00de34ef2ef4') # to raw binary
    b'\x00\xde4\xef.\xf4'
    >>> binascii.hexlify(_) # and back to hex
    b'00de34ef2ef4'
    >>> _.decode('ascii') # as str in Python 3
    '00de34ef2ef4'
    

