Replace binascii and struct with native Python methods

[v1bh475u]

Checklist

closes #2327

• No CHANGELOG update needed

• No new tests needed

• No documentation update needed

[williballenthin]

some of these changes i like, such as the hex conversions. those are much cleaner.

but the migration from using struct doesn't seem as clear cut. what benefits do the new code constructs bring? i find the lines much noisier (lots of repeated kwargs) and therefore hard to read. given that struct is a built in Python module, i don't yet understand the desire to remove it here. can you explains a bit @v1bh475u ?

[v1bh475u]

i find this region to be very noisy and hard to read.

I also felt that way but thought the issue wished for removing dependency of struct. Personally, I feel struct code looks much cleaner wherever struct.unpack_from is used. Shall I revert the commits for struct and make another one which does not remove those lines?

[williballenthin]

that would be great! then we can continue to discuss struct vs int separately.

[v1bh475u]

Done with changes.

[williballenthin]

these look great. please give yourself some credit in the changelog!

[v1bh475u]

under what header should I add?

[williballenthin]

bug fixes

[fariss]

I agree with the fact that the repeated kwargs make the code not easy to read.

some of these changes i like, such as the hex conversions. those are much cleaner.

That's exactly my initial thought when suggesting to use int. Generally speaking, struct is usually used to pack a lot of data together with longer format strings (See discussion here around the use of struct vs int https://stackoverflow.com/a/56799074)

For consistency, let's keep using struct for now