I am currently trying to find a way to convert any sort of text to a number, so that it can later be converted back to text. So something like this:
text = "some string"
number = somefunction(text)
text = someotherfunction(number)
print(text) #output "some string"
If you're using Python 3, it's pretty easy. First, convert the str to bytes in a chosen encoding (utf-8 is usually appropriate), then use int.from_bytes to convert to an int:
number = int.from_bytes(mystring.encode('utf-8'), 'little')
Converting back is slightly trickier (and will lose trailing NUL bytes unless you've stored how long the resulting string should be somewhere else; if you switch to 'big' endianness, you lose leading NUL bytes instead of trailing):
recoveredstring = number.to_bytes((number.bit_length() + 7) // 8, 'little').decode('utf-8')
You can do something similar in Python 2, but it's less efficient/direct:
import binascii
number = int(binascii.hexlify(mystring.encode('utf-8')), 16)
hx = '%x' % number
hx = hx.zfill(len(hx) + (len(hx) & 1)) # Make even length hex nibbles
recoveredstring = binascii.unhexlify(hx).decode('utf-8')
That's equivalent to the 'big' endian approach in Python 3; reversing the intermediate bytes as you go in each direction would get the 'little' effect.
You can use the ASCII values to do this:
ASCII to int:
ord('a') # = 97
Back to a string:
str(unichr(97)) # = 'a'
From there you could iterate over the string one character at a time and store these in another string. Assuming you are using standard ASCII characters, you would need to zero pad the numbers (because some are two digits and some three) like so:
s = 'My string'
number_string = ''
for c in s:
number_string += str(ord(c)).zfill(3)
To decode this, you will read the new string three characters at a time and decode them into a new string.
This assumes a few things:
