How can I generate a wallet in python?

Question

Im trying to write a python script that can generate a new wallet for that user, but I need to be able to keep the private key.

I followed this : Stack overflow answer
And got these results:

import os
from ethereum import utils
key = utils.sha3(os.urandom(4096))
print key
Out[5]: 'L\xf7\x98\x06\xb9\xbe>?
c\x88\xd3\xa7\x05\xdd\xe8AtNe\xf3\xe7Pc\xed\xd8L~\\\xcc\rq\x18'
raw = utils.privtoaddr(key)
print raw
Out[7]: 
'n\x98V8\x05\xa1\x05\x9b\x18\xca%\xb3\xed\xd0\xd5\xa9I\xf8\x97\x15'
add = utils.checksum_encode(raw)
print add
Out[9]: '0x6e98563805A1059B18ca25B3edd0d5a949f89715'

So, I was able to get an address, but I'm not exactly sure what am I seeing here in the "key" and "raw" variables

Os is Ubuntu 16.4, running python 2.7.12
Note that this is a small personal project for learning, so I don't really mind any "security" issues

Edit: I was able to use this to create to do what I needed, I will leave this question open since Im still interested about my first way. https://github.com/vkobel/ethereum-generate-wallet

Answer 1

It looks like you're in Python 2. Py2 represents bytes in a latin-1 encoded string. Sometimes you'll see ascii characters, other times you'll see something like \x18 which means the byte 00011000, aka 18 in hex, or 24 as an integer. A private key is just a bunch of bytes back-to-back.

raw is the binary representation of the address. The address in addr is the hex string representation (with checksumming defined in EIP-55). Note the ending of the address: 15, which corresponds to \x15 in addr.

---

You may also be interested in web3.py v4 features for private key management: http://web3py.readthedocs.io/en/latest/web3.eth.account.html

It looks like:

>>> from web3.auto import w3
>>> acct = w3.eth.account.create('KEYSMASH FJAFJKLDSKF7JKFDJ 1530')
>>> acct.address
'0x5ce9454909639D2D17A3F753ce7d93fa0b9aB12E'
>>> acct.privateKey
b"\xb2\\}\xb3\x1f\xee\xd9\x12''\xbf\t9\xdcv\x9a\x96VK-\xe4\xc4rm\x03[6\xec\xf1\xe5\xb3d"

If you would like to see the hex encoding of the private key, you can use:

>>> acct.privateKey.hex()
'b25c7db31feed9122727bf0939dc769a96564b2de4c4726d035b36ecf1e5b364'