Conversion of an array of integers to string

In order to save memory space. Strings inside an embedded device are stored in a particular way. Each 32-bit location holds up to 4 chars instead of only 1 char in the usual case.

I wrote a function that convert an encoded string back to its original string. I am new to Python, so I would like to know whether or not I can simplify my code.

The string is encoded in such way that I need to reverse the order of each group of 4 chars.

#!/usr/bin/python
def arrayOfInt2string(array):
    s = ''
    for a in array:
        a = "%0.8x" % a
        b = list()
        for i in range(0, len(a), 2):
            b.append(chr(int(a[i:i+2], 16)))            
        s = s + ''.join(b.reverse())
    return s

r = (
    0x33323130,
    0x37363534,
    0x00000038,
    0x00000000
)
arrayOfInt2string(r)

The output is:

"012345678"

If you are going to be playing with string representations of native types, you probably want to take a look at the struct standard library package.

With it, you can quickly process your r as follows:

>>> import struct
>>> ''.join(struct.pack('i', rr) for rr in r)
'012345678\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'

And you can play with the ordering of the characters by explicitly describing the endianess of your input:

>>> ''.join(struct.pack('>i', rr) for rr in r)  # big endian
'32107654\x00\x00\x008\x00\x00\x00\x00'

StackExchange Code Review Q#102680, answer score: 5