How to Perform the Bitwise Xor of Two Strings in Python

This article shows you how to perform bitwise exclusive or of two strings in Python.

Use the ^ Operator to Perform the Bitwise Exclusive OR of Two Strings in Python

You can use the ^ operator to perform Bitwise XOR strings in Python. The example below illustrates this.

s1 = "100001"
s2 = "101100"
l = [ord(a) ^ ord(b) for a, b in zip(s1, s2)]
print(l)

The zip() function takes the two strings and aggregates them in a tuple. Here, the ord() function returns the integer representing the characters in the byte string.

Next, we use the ^ XOR operator between the two strings to perform the Bitwise Exclusive OR operation on their respective binary representations.

Output:

[0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1]