hexadecimal string to byte array in python

>>> hex_string = "deadbeef"
Convert it to a string (Python ≤ 2.6):

>>> hex_data = hex_string.decode("hex")
>>> hex_data
"\xde\xad\xbe\xef"
or since Python 2.7 and Python 3.0:

>>> bytearray.fromhex(hex_data)
bytearray(b'\xde\xad\xbe\xef')