How can I parse a char array with octal values in Python?

EDIT: I should note that I want a general case for any hex array, not just the google one I provided.

EDIT BACKGROUND: Background is networking: I'm parsing a DNS packet and trying to get its QNAME. I'm taking in the whole packet as a string, and every character represents a byte. Apparently this problem looks like a Pascal string problem, and using the struct module seems like the way to go.

I have a char array in Python 2.7 which includes octal values. For example, let's say I have an array

DNS = "\03www\06google\03com\0"

I want to get:

www.google.com

What's an efficient way to do this? My first thought would be iterating through the DNS char array and adding chars to my new array answer. Every time i see a '\' char, I would ignore the '\' and two chars after it. Is there a way to get the resulting www.google.com without using a new array?

my disgusting implementation (my answer is an array of chars, which is not what i want, i want just the string www.google.com:

DNS = "\\03www\\06google\\03com\\0"
answer = []
i = 0
while i < len(DNS):
    if DNS[i] == '\\' and DNS[i+1] != 0:
        i += 3    
    elif DNS[i] == '\\' and DNS[i+1] == 0:
        break
    else:
        answer.append(DNS[i])
        i += 1

Solution

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