Parse string representation of binary loaded from CSV

Asked May 16 '19 at 14:56

Active May 16 '19 at 14:56

Viewed 25 times

I have a UTF-8 encoded CSV with a column that contains the string representation of a WKB (i.e., string representation of bytes). I'm primarily interested in getting this string back into the original bytes, but when I read the CSV I get a string literal.

Assume that I cannot change how the data is stored in the CSV (i.e., save the column as WKT).

For example:

from shapely import wkb, geometry
point = wkb.dumps(geometry.Point(42.42, 42.42))
print(type(point))
print(point)

<class 'bytes'>
b'\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\xf6(\\\x8f\xc25E@\xf6(\\\x8f\xc25E@'

The printed bytes in the above snippet are saved in a CSV file. I need to read that string from the CSV file back into the bytes it represents.

asked May 16 '19 at 14:56

Tim Reddy

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So what you get from the csv is `"b'\xa1\x23...'"`? That is, the "b" is _inside_ the string? – snakecharmerb May 16 '19 at 15:27
Yes, the string in the CSV is as you describe. – Tim Reddy May 16 '19 at 15:41
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`bytes_ = ast.literal_eval(string_of_bytes)` – snakecharmerb May 16 '19 at 15:45
Yes, using that is working perfectly :D Thanks! – Tim Reddy May 16 '19 at 16:47

Parse string representation of binary loaded from CSV

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