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Operations on bytes Objects

Chris Bailey

Strings and Character Data in Python
Christopher Bailey 08:08 0 Comments

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In this lesson, you’ll explore the common sequence operations that bytes objects support. You’ll take a closer look at:

  • The in and not in operators
  • Concatenation (+) and replication (*) operators
  • Indexing and slicing
  • Built-in functions len(), min(), and max()
  • Methods for bytes objects
  • bytes.fromhex(<s>) and b.hex()

For more information about hexadecimal values, check out the following resources:

Here’s how to use the in and not in operators:

>>>
>>> a = b'abcde'
>>> a
b'abcde'

>>> b'cd' in a
True
>>> b'spam' in a
False
>>> b'spam' not in a
True

Here’s how to use the concatenation (+) and replication (*) operators:

>>>
>>> a = b'abcde'
>>> a
b'abcde
>>> b = b'fghij'
>>> b
b'fghij'

>>> a + b
b'abcdefghij'

>>> a * 3
b'fghijfghijfghij'

Here’s how to do indexing and slicing:

>>>
>>> a = b'abcde'
>>> a[2]
99
>>> a[1]
98
>>> a[2:4]
b'cd'
>>> a[1:5]
b'bcde'

Here’s how to use the built-in functions len(), min(), and max():

>>>
>>> a = b'abcde'
>>> len(a)
5
>>> max(a)
101
>>> chr(101)
'e'
>>> min(a)
97
>>> chr(97)
'a'

Here’s how to use the methods for bytes objects:

>>>
>>> a = b'spam,egg,spam,bacon,spam,lobster'
>>> a
b'spam,egg,spam,bacon,spam,lobster'
>>> a.count(b'spam')
3
>>> a.count('spam')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
    a.count('spam')
TypeError: argument should be integer or bytes-like object, not 'str'

>>> a.endswith(b'ster')
True

>>> a.find(b'bacon')
14

>>> a
b'spam,egg,spam,bacon,spam,lobster'
>>> a.split(sep=b',')
[b'spam', b'egg', b'spam', b'bacon' , b'spam', b'lobster']

>>> a.center(40, b'-')
b'----spam,egg,spam,bacon,spam,lobster----'

>>> a.center(40, ' ')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
    a.center(40, ' ')
TypeError: center() argument 2 must be a byte string of length 1, not 'str'

Here’s how to use bytes.fromhex(<s>) and b.hex():

>>>
>>> a = b'spam,egg,spam,bacon,spam,lobster'
>>> a[1]
112
>>> a[3]
109
>>> hex(a[0])
'0x73'
>>> a[0]
115
>>> list(a)
[115, 112, 97, 109, 44, 101, 103, 103, 44, 115, 112, 97, 109, 44, 98, 97, 99, 111, 110, 44, 115, 112, 97, 109, 44, 108, 111, 98, 115, 116, 101, 114]

>>> b = bytes.fromhex(' aa 68 32 af ')
>>> b
b'\xaah2\xaf'
>>> list(b)
[170, 104, 50, 175]

>>> b
b'\xaah2\xaf'
>>> b.hex()
'aa6832af'
>>> type(b.hex())
<class 'str'>

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