Now that you've explained your real problem, none of the answers you've gotten so far will work. Why? Because they're all ways to remove sequences like \03
from a string. But you don't have sequences like \03
, you have single control characters.
You could, of course, do something similar, just replacing any control character with a dot.
But what you're really trying to do is not replace control characters with dots, but parse DNS packets.
DNS is defined by RFC 1035. The QNAME in a DNS packet is:
a domain name represented as a sequence of labels, where each label consists of a length octet followed by that number of octets. The domain name terminates with the zero length octet for the null label of the root. Note that this field may be an odd number of octets; no padding is used.
So, let's parse that. If you understand how "labels consisting of "a length octet followed by that number of octets" relates to "Pascal strings", there's a quicker way. Also, you could write this more cleanly and less verbosely as a generator. But let's do it the dead-simple way:
def parse_qname(packet):
components = []
offset = 0
while True:
length, = struct.unpack_from('B', packet, offset)
offset += 1
if not length:
break
component = struct.unpack_from('{}s'.format(length), packet, offset)
offset += length
components.append(component)
return components, offset