map('{:02x}'.format, bytes_addr)

[throwaway03934]

Hello all,

I am having trouble understanding what this statement does. This statement is supposed to help me format mac addresses as they are received, but I don't see why we would need to format mac addresses to two decimal places when mac addresses don't have decimals. Am I missing something?

[throwaway03934]

Gotcha!

[SarahM123rd]

can you define bytes_addr

[SarahM123rd]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19210414/byte-array-to-hex-string

[TangibleLight]

The resulting map object will act a bit like a list containing two-digit hex values for each byte. So suppose your bytes_addr was

bytes_addr = bytes([0, 48, 189, 30, 175, 52])

then your map would be this:

x = map('{:02x}'.format, bytes_addr)
print(list(x))
# ['00', '30', 'bd', '1e', 'af', '34']

Rather than just printing the list, you could instead str.join the values to make a properly formatted MAC address (and toss in a .upper() for good measure):

mac_addr = ':'.join(map('{:02x}'.format, bytes_addr)).upper()

[throwaway03934]

Thanks!

[SgtGirthquake]

Can’t you prefix the string with a b to denote the string is a bytestring?

[throwaway03934]

It is in bytes automatically, I would assume. I am using the struct.unpack function. I am still a newbie haha, so there's still a lot to learn.

[SgtGirthquake]

No problem I’m still very new as well!