How to create python bytes object from long hex string?

Question

I have a long sequence of hex digits in a string, such as

000000000000484240FA063DE5D0B744ADBED63A81FAEA390000C8428640A43D5005BD44

only much longer, several kilobytes. Is there a builtin way to convert this to a bytes object in python 2.6/3?

Answer 1

Works in Python 2.7 and higher including python3:

result = bytearray.fromhex('deadbeef')

Note: There seems to be a bug with the bytearray.fromhex() function in Python 2.6. The python.org documentation states that the function accepts a string as an argument, but when applied, the following error is thrown:

>>> bytearray.fromhex('B9 01EF')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: fromhex() argument 1 must be unicode, not str`