On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 11:15 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > Why decide that the bytes type is best considered as a list of > bytes rather than a string of bytes? It doesn't have any list methods, it > looks like a string and people use it as a string. As you have discovered, > it is an inconvenient annoyance that indexing returns an int instead of a > one-byte byte-string. > > I think that, in hindsight, this was a major screw-up in Python 3.
Which part was? The fact that it can be represented with a (prefixed) quoted string? bytes_value = (41, 42, 43, 44) string = bytes_value.decode() # "ABCD" I think it's more convenient to let people use a notation similar to what was used in Py2, but perhaps this is an attractive nuisance, if it gives rise to issues like this. If a bytes were more like a tuple of ints (not a list - immutability is closer) than it is like a string, would that be clearer? Perhaps the solution isn't even a code one, but a mental one. "A bytes is like a tuple of ints" might be a useful mantra. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
