On 03/07/2016 05:45 PM, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Tue, Mar 8, 2016 at 11:22 AM, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote: >> >> (Is a byte string the same as a byte array? Is a byte array the same as an >> array.array? If I remove this line from my code, where 'data' has just been >> read from a file: >> >> data=array.array('B',data) >> >> then it still works - Python 3. But not on Python 2. If I do .read on a >> binary file I get a byte string in Python 3, but a string in Python 2. That >> sort of mess. > > The default string in Py2 *is* a byte string.
There are some interesting differences I found between a Python 2 string (composed of bytes) and a Python 3 byte string, such as what you'd get from calling read() on a file handle opened in binary mode. That is in Python 2, indexing a string returns a string of length 1. In Python 3.5, indexing a byte string returns a value, the equivalent of calling ord() on the single byte string. This makes it a bit difficult to make the code easily work between Python 2 and 3 and handle bytes. Any ideas there? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list