Q:

bits to string python

I have used this function to convert string to bits.
def a2bits(chars):
     return bin(reduce(lambda x, y : (x<<8)+y, (ord(c) for c in chars), 1))[3:]

How would I go about doing the reverse? Bits to string. Would I have to separate the bits into ASCII numbers and then convert them into characters?
I got the function a2bits from this site: http://www.daniweb.com/software-development/python/code/221031/string-to-bits
Is there something in the standard library to convert bits to string?

A:

>>> def bits2a(b):
...     return ''.join(chr(int(''.join(x), 2)) for x in zip(*[iter(b)]*8))
... 
>>> bits2a('0110100001100101011011000110110001101111')
'hello'

