How to convert string to binary?

Something like this?

>>> st = "hello world"
>>> ' '.join(format(ord(x), 'b') for x in st)
'1101000 1100101 1101100 1101100 1101111 100000 1110111 1101111 1110010 1101100 1100100'

#using `bytearray`
>>> ' '.join(format(x, 'b') for x in bytearray(st, 'utf-8'))
'1101000 1100101 1101100 1101100 1101111 100000 1110111 1101111 1110010 1101100 1100100'

If by binary you mean bytes type, you can just use encode method of the string object that encodes your string as a bytes object using the passed encoding type. You just need to make sure you pass a proper encoding to encode function.

In [9]: "hello world".encode('ascii')                                                                                                                                                                       
Out[9]: b'hello world'

In [10]: byte_obj = "hello world".encode('ascii')                                                                                                                                                           

In [11]: byte_obj                                                                                                                                                                                           
Out[11]: b'hello world'

In [12]: byte_obj[0]                                                                                                                                                                                        
Out[12]: 104

Otherwise, if you want them in form of zeros and ones --binary representation-- as a more pythonic way you can first convert your string to byte array then use bin function within map :

>>> st = "hello world"
>>> map(bin,bytearray(st))
['0b1101000', '0b1100101', '0b1101100', '0b1101100', '0b1101111', '0b100000', '0b1110111', '0b1101111', '0b1110010', '0b1101100', '0b1100100']
 

Or you can join it:

>>> ' '.join(map(bin,bytearray(st)))
'0b1101000 0b1100101 0b1101100 0b1101100 0b1101111 0b100000 0b1110111 0b1101111 0b1110010 0b1101100 0b1100100'

Note that in python3 you need to specify an encoding for bytearray function :

>>> ' '.join(map(bin,bytearray(st,'utf8')))
'0b1101000 0b1100101 0b1101100 0b1101100 0b1101111 0b100000 0b1110111 0b1101111 0b1110010 0b1101100 0b1100100'

You can also use binascii module in python 2:

>>> import binascii
>>> bin(int(binascii.hexlify(st),16))
'0b110100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000111011101101111011100100110110001100100'

hexlify return the hexadecimal representation of the binary data then you can convert to int by specifying 16 as its base then convert it to binary with bin.

We just need to encode it.

'string'.encode('ascii')

You can access the code values for the characters in your string using the ord() built-in function. If you then need to format this in binary, the string.format() method will do the job.

a = "test"
print(' '.join(format(ord(x), 'b') for x in a))

(Thanks to Ashwini Chaudhary for posting that code snippet.)

While the above code works in Python 3, this matter gets more complicated if you're assuming any encoding other than UTF-8. In Python 2, strings are byte sequences, and ASCII encoding is assumed by default. In Python 3, strings are assumed to be Unicode, and there's a separate bytes type that acts more like a Python 2 string. If you wish to assume any encoding other than UTF-8, you'll need to specify the encoding.

In Python 3, then, you can do something like this:

a = "test"
a_bytes = bytes(a, "ascii")
print(' '.join(["{0:b}".format(x) for x in a_bytes]))

The differences between UTF-8 and ascii encoding won't be obvious for simple alphanumeric strings, but will become important if you're processing text that includes characters not in the ascii character set.