Martin Panter added the comment:

FWIW a long time ago I wanted fast XORing of 512-byte “sectors” of Rar files. 
Initially I think I used array.array with the largest word size available, or 
numpy if available. Later when I learnt more Python I discovered the 
int.from_bytes() trick, and used int(hexlify(...), 16) in Python 2. So I guess 
the array module was a relatively obvious place to look, and the long integer 
trick was unexpected (I’d never programmed with unlimited size integers before).

Serhiy’s bit array idea also seems interesting. I bet somebody has already 
written a package. Maybe it could also be useful for things like Huffman 
encoding, where you string various bit strings together into a sequence of 
bytes. But I do wonder if all these things are too specialized for Python’s 
standard library.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue19251>
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