I have trouble hashing binaries [python]

Question

I want to hash this binaries: 0011001010000101011111010000101111111111101000001001000001001010110100010101111001001011000100111100011110001001111011110111011010010100110011001110111001100010111011010010101101010011110100100110101111110001100101011001000110100010000110110001100101110001
Hashing them correctly returns the hash: f3f06d74b794b20645460aa0b17d4e7a77eaaea283ee55344adbfcece4a63432
if I use hashlib.sha256(x.encode('utf-8')) I get something different
44f6dafa3d7a1720b5ebbf2adc1663df4dab03776eed48d2cda775237a547e59
So bin() still returns string data. How can I convert it to binary data or make the hash function see the string as binaries?

Answer 1

Your code is hashing the utf8 bytes for the characters '0' and '1' which looks like b"0011" == bytes([0x30, 0x30, 0x31, 0x31]).
You have to convert the binary into actual bytes first.
Convert the binary string to an int:
int(x, 2)
Convert the int to bytes using the to_bytes(length, byteorder) method:
int(x, 2).to_bytes(len(x) // 8, "big") // length of the binary string was 256 so you have 256 / 8 = 32 bytes
You can now hash this value.

Answer 2

thanks, this worked perfectly