Number-Systems-Converter

Convert your string text into hexadecimals, octodecimals or binary.

Initialising Variables and Modules

To start, I import the modules. I will also initiate the output variable which will determine our converted output after various user inputs.

import binascii
output = ''

Options

After initialising my variables and modules, I can now display a menu. The user can choose to input an option to convert text to either hexadecimals, binary or octodecimals.

print('[1] convert to binary')
print('[2] covnert to hexadecimals')
print('[3] convert to octodecimals')
print('[4] decode to hexadecimals to text')
option = input('select option: ')

I run a while loop to validate the user input of the options above to prompt the user to select an option above based on the options above.

while not (option == '1' or option == '2' or option == '3' or option == '4'):
    print('invalid input')
    option = input('select option: ')

Respective Encryptions

Now I each code according to the user input of the four options above in order to encrypt the string inputs into the respective number systems.

Encrypting Strings to Binary

if option == '1':
    string = input('enter string to cipher: ')
    for char in range(len(string)):
        char_num = bin(ord(string[char]))
        output += char_num[2:]

If user input is 1, which is to convert the string into binary, a for loop is used to respectively convert each character in the string into a ASCII value (this is done using the ord() function. Simultaneously, the ASCII value is converted into binary values and then stitched together to form a series of binary values in the variable output.

Note: Whenever an integer (In this case, the ASCII value of a character) is converted into binary, Python tends to add 0b into the binary value to show that it is indeed a binary value, and not a series of integers. Thus, it is important to slice the first two characters (0b) of that one character's binary value, so that there aren't any 0bs mixing around in the output variable.

Encrypting Strings to Hexadecimals

elif option == '2':
    string = input('enter string to cipher: ')
    for char in range(len(string)):
        char_num = hex(ord(string[char]))
        output += char_num[2:]

If the user input is 2, the string will be encoded into hexadecimals. This is the exact same algorithm as the code we seen in ciphering strings into binary. The only different is that in the for loop, char_num stores the hexadecimal of the ASCII value using the hex() function.

Encrypting Strings to Octodecimals

elif option == '3':
    string = input('enter string to cipher: ')
    for char in range(len(string)):
        char_num = oct(ord(string[char]))
        output += char_num[2:]

If user input is 3, the string will be encoded into octdecimals. Again, replace the first function with the oct() function to convert the character's ASCII value into octodecimals into char_num

Decrypting Number Systems to Text

Users can decode their encrypted messages by selecting the option 4. In order to determine the values of the number systems, number value prefixes must be inputted. This is because if prefixes are not added, this will give an invalid syntax. We want to convert the raw encoded hexadecimal values into denary values. This will also not work if the series of values are in string. Otherwise, the prompt will be iterated in a while loop until the user can give a required input.

Decoding Encrypted Values

    
    elif option == '4':
      string = input('enter string to decipher: ')
      output = binascii.unhexlify(string).decode()

print('value: ', output)

Using the bytearray.fromhex(string).decode() function, we can decode hexadecimals into strings.

Other values can be decoded using the for loop.

Dry Run

Option Menu

[1] convert to binary
[2] covnert to hexadecimals
[3] convert to octodecimals
[4] decode to text
select option: 5
invalid input
select option: 

Encrypting to Binary

select option: 1
enter string to cipher: hello world
value:  1101000110010111011001101100110111110000011101111101111111001011011001100100

Encrypting to Hexadecimals

select option: 2
enter string to cipher: hello world
value:  68656c6c6f20776f726c64

Encrypting to Octodecimals

select option: 3
enter string to cipher: hello world
value:  15014515415415740167157162154144

Decrypting

# hexadecimal-example
select option: 4
- put 0x if hexadecimal
- put 0b if binary
- put 0o if octodecimal
enter string to decipher: 0x68656c6c6f20776f726c64
value:  hello world