how do I turn a hex byte into an integer?

the error that gets thrown is

    print(chr(hex(int(sel,16))))          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^TypeError: 'str' object cannot be interpreted as an integer

the code given is

for i in range(0,len(text),2):    sel = "0x"+text[i:i+2]    #print(sel)    print(chr(hex(int(sel,16))))

so how do I get the hex bytes to be an integer, for chr to output the correct character?

edit: i figured it out.