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Python 3: An interactive deep dive

Strings vs. Bytes

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Bytes are bytes; characters are an abstraction. An immutable sequence of Unicode characters is called a string. An immutable sequence of numbers-between-0-and-255 is called a bytes object.

Python 3.5
by = b'abcd\x65'
print (by)
#b'abcde'
print (type(by) )         #②
#<class 'bytes'>
print (len(by) )          #③
#5
by += b'\xff'             #④
print (by)
#b'abcde\xff'
print (len(by))           #⑤
#6
print (by[0])             #⑥
#97
Python 3.5
by = b'abcd\x65'
print (by[0] = 102)       #⑦
# File "/usercode/__ed_file.py", line 2
# print (by[0] = 102) #\u2466
# ^
#SyntaxError: keyword can't be an expression

① To define a bytes object, use the b'' “byte literal” syntax. Each byte within the byte literal can be an ASCII character or an encoded hexadecimal number from \x00 to \xff (0–255).

② The type of a bytes object is bytes.

③ Just like lists and strings, you can get the length of a bytes object with the built-in len() function.

④ Just like lists and strings, you can use the +operator to concatenate bytes objects. The result is a new bytes object.

⑤ ...