Python Bytes
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Python Bytes | The #1 Python News Podcast
Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Calvin Hendryx-Parker.
Python
docs.python.org › 3 › builtins › stdtypes.html
Built-in Types — Python 3.14.7 documentation
For performance reasons, the value of errors is not checked for validity unless an encoding error actually occurs, Python Development Mode is enabled or a debug build is used. For example: >>> encoded_str_to_bytes = 'Python'.encode() >>> type(encoded_str_to_bytes) <class 'bytes'> >>> encoded_str_to_bytes b'Python'
I don't understand Python bytes objects, its purpose and when to use it?
A chunk of bytes is just raw memory or storage contents - zeroes and ones collected into groups of eight bits, and it doesn't have any specific meaning until you decide how to interpret it. If I have four bytes, what do they mean? Are they ASCII characters, UNICODE codepoints, or an integer? If they're an integer, are they big-endian or little-endian? What if your program doesn't need to know - if it's just shifting the bytes from one place to another, it doesn't matter. Networks and files are of this nature - the data could be anything, so if you don't have to know what's in there, it's not worth checking. The operating system thus usually makes no assumptions as to the type of data held within the bytes when transporting it over the network or to and from storage. I'm afraid this explanation has got pretty long, but I've tried to cover enough background to explain the main concepts and drivers behind why we now have the bytes type. The TL;DR is "we have the bytes type because it was necessary to get around problems caused by assumptions in code that would cause difficult-to-debug problems when those assumptions were not met; treating data of an unknown encoding as raw bytes gives you explicit errors that force you to deal with the unknowns rather than just hoping for the best". So, if some chunk of bytes is supposed to be text, you need to know how it's encoded - is it ASCII, UNICODE or EBCDIC? If you guess and treat it as ASCII when it's EBCDIC, you will get gibberish, and vice-versa. Old Python, and lots of other languages of the time treated raw data as strings, and this ended up causing a lot of problems in corner cases, especially to do with networking and file I/O. Lots of libraries accepted strings as input, and assumed that they contained ASCII data, or other textual encodings, and failed in unexpected ways when that assumption was incorrect. Then, as the internet became ubiquitous around the world, extended character encodings became important. Standard ASCII, the encoding used at the time, represents each character with a 7-bit byte, so it only has 127 code points, though you can go up to 255 if you use extended 8-bit versions, so it doesn't have an easy way to display all the characters and punctuation common in non-English speaking languages. In the early 90's, you used to select whichever codepage was best for your language, but in doing so, you often couldn't display characters from other languages, which was bad if you wanted to work internationally. Imagine if Facebook only worked with the standard American symbol set - no accents, no other currency symbols, no Chinese, or other non-alphabetical texts... it wouldn't have ever got popular outside of the US. So Unicode became a thing, which seeks to encode all character sets eventually. It's based on ASCII, but adds the ability to represent character points which are composed of more than one byte, thus, if you try to print out Unicode as ASCII, you will end up printing garbage whenever you hit a "long character". To complicate things further, there are multiple ways of storing Unicode - variable length, fixed-length in various sizes. You really need to know what you're dealing with to process it properly. In the end, a decision was made to transition Python over to support Unicode properly, and in order to prevent functions that accepted a string, and expected it to have a specific encoding choking on data that didn't match that expectation, a new raw data concept - bytes - was introduced. Now if you try to feed binary data into a function that expects a string, it will cause an error, rather than subtly screwing up because the data doesn't match its expectations. More on reddit.com
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June 11, 2020Can someone please explain what is bytes in Python and why we need it?
The first thing that comes to mind is networking. Your TCP/IP or UDP sockets send (and recieve) bytes. Having a dedicated structure that you can access can prevent the need to encode/decode your data at every intermediary step and you can just handle it as you pass it around before turning it back into a string or image/sound/etc More on reddit.com
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January 9, 2023What is Python's bytes type actually used for? - Stack Overflow
Could somebody explain the general purpose of the bytes type in Python 3, or give some examples where it is preferred over other data types? I see that the advantage of bytearrays over strings is t... More on stackoverflow.com
python - Why does "bytes(n)" create a length n byte string instead of converting n to a binary representation? - Stack Overflow
I was trying to build this bytes object in Python 3: b'3\r\n' so I tried the obvious (for me), and found a weird behaviour: >>> bytes(3) + b'\r\n' b'\x00\x00\x00\r\n' Apparently: >&... More on stackoverflow.com
GeeksforGeeks
geeksforgeeks.org › python › python-bytes-method
Python bytes() method - GeeksforGeeks
July 11, 2025 - By passing a single integer to bytes(), Python will create a bytes object of that length, filled with zero values (because a byte is initially 0).
The Python Coding Stack
thepythoncodingstack.com › the python coding stack › `bytes`: the lesser-known python built-in sequence • and understanding utf-8 encoding
`bytes`: The Lesser-Known Python Built-In Sequence • And Understanding UTF-8 Encoding
July 15, 2025 - The first three bytes represent the first three characters C, a, and f. These are single bytes containing the characters' ASCII codes, which each fit within a single byte. The last two bytes combined represent the last character, é. ... Do ...
Pythonbytes
pythonbytes.fm › episodes › all
Episodes - Python Bytes Podcast
Python Bytes podcast delivers headlines directly to your earbuds.
W3Schools
w3schools.com › python › ref_func_bytes.asp
Python bytes() Function
It can convert objects into bytes objects, or create empty bytes object of the specified size.
Programiz
programiz.com › python-programming › methods › built-in › bytes
Python bytes()
Online Python Online JavaScript ... Online Go Online Rust Online Scala Online Dart Online R Online Ruby ... The bytes() method returns an immutable bytes object initialized with the given size and data....
Reddit
reddit.com › r/learnpython › i don't understand python bytes objects, its purpose and when to use it?
r/learnpython on Reddit: I don't understand Python bytes objects, its purpose and when to use it?
June 11, 2020 -
I am haveing some hard time here trying to understand Python's bytes object. Why it was intruduced, when to use it? and Why to use it? Why older python didn't have bytes object, and things were kind ok, and they came up with the ideas to invent bytes object?
Appraciate if someone could point to an artice/video where bytes object is explaned like if I am five years old.
Thanks.
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bytes objects are used whenever you need to deal with some sort of data you don't necessarily understand. For example, let's say you're opening a network connection. What do you send over that connection? You send data in some form, and that data doesn't have to be text - it could be, but it could also be a more complicated protocol with its own data format like, say, HTTP/2 or SSH. How do you represent that data in Python? You can't use str, because the data might not be text, or even representable as text. You could use a list of numbers, but that's really inefficent. Thus, bytes.
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A chunk of bytes is just raw memory or storage contents - zeroes and ones collected into groups of eight bits, and it doesn't have any specific meaning until you decide how to interpret it. If I have four bytes, what do they mean? Are they ASCII characters, UNICODE codepoints, or an integer? If they're an integer, are they big-endian or little-endian? What if your program doesn't need to know - if it's just shifting the bytes from one place to another, it doesn't matter. Networks and files are of this nature - the data could be anything, so if you don't have to know what's in there, it's not worth checking. The operating system thus usually makes no assumptions as to the type of data held within the bytes when transporting it over the network or to and from storage. I'm afraid this explanation has got pretty long, but I've tried to cover enough background to explain the main concepts and drivers behind why we now have the bytes type. The TL;DR is "we have the bytes type because it was necessary to get around problems caused by assumptions in code that would cause difficult-to-debug problems when those assumptions were not met; treating data of an unknown encoding as raw bytes gives you explicit errors that force you to deal with the unknowns rather than just hoping for the best". So, if some chunk of bytes is supposed to be text, you need to know how it's encoded - is it ASCII, UNICODE or EBCDIC? If you guess and treat it as ASCII when it's EBCDIC, you will get gibberish, and vice-versa. Old Python, and lots of other languages of the time treated raw data as strings, and this ended up causing a lot of problems in corner cases, especially to do with networking and file I/O. Lots of libraries accepted strings as input, and assumed that they contained ASCII data, or other textual encodings, and failed in unexpected ways when that assumption was incorrect. Then, as the internet became ubiquitous around the world, extended character encodings became important. Standard ASCII, the encoding used at the time, represents each character with a 7-bit byte, so it only has 127 code points, though you can go up to 255 if you use extended 8-bit versions, so it doesn't have an easy way to display all the characters and punctuation common in non-English speaking languages. In the early 90's, you used to select whichever codepage was best for your language, but in doing so, you often couldn't display characters from other languages, which was bad if you wanted to work internationally. Imagine if Facebook only worked with the standard American symbol set - no accents, no other currency symbols, no Chinese, or other non-alphabetical texts... it wouldn't have ever got popular outside of the US. So Unicode became a thing, which seeks to encode all character sets eventually. It's based on ASCII, but adds the ability to represent character points which are composed of more than one byte, thus, if you try to print out Unicode as ASCII, you will end up printing garbage whenever you hit a "long character". To complicate things further, there are multiple ways of storing Unicode - variable length, fixed-length in various sizes. You really need to know what you're dealing with to process it properly. In the end, a decision was made to transition Python over to support Unicode properly, and in order to prevent functions that accepted a string, and expected it to have a specific encoding choking on data that didn't match that expectation, a new raw data concept - bytes - was introduced. Now if you try to feed binary data into a function that expects a string, it will cause an error, rather than subtly screwing up because the data doesn't match its expectations.
DataCamp
datacamp.com › tutorial › bytes-to-string-python
How to Convert Bytes to String in Python | DataCamp
June 12, 2024 - To convert bytes to strings in Python, we can use the decode() method, specifying the appropriate encoding.
Real Python
realpython.com › python-bytes
Bytes Objects: Handling Binary Data in Python – Real Python
March 5, 2025 - The difference between bytes and bytearray is that bytes objects are read-only, while bytearray objects are mutable. You convert a Python string to bytes using the str.encode() method, the bytes() function, or the codecs module.
Python-future
python-future.org › bytes_object.html
bytes — Python-Future documentation
Here is an example that works identically on Python 2.x and 3.x: >>> from builtins import bytes >>> b = bytes(b'\xff') >>> b.decode('utf-8', 'surrogateescape') '\udcc3'
Reddit
reddit.com › r/learnpython › can someone please explain what is bytes in python and why we need it?
r/learnpython on Reddit: Can someone please explain what is bytes in Python and why we need it?
January 9, 2023 -
Well I am having little bit hard time trying to understand what are bytes (object, data model) and why we need it. I know there are lists, dictionaries, string and all that data types. But what is bytes?
Top answer 1 of 6
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Fear the python bytes 🐍 🦷
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The first thing that comes to mind is networking. Your TCP/IP or UDP sockets send (and recieve) bytes. Having a dedicated structure that you can access can prevent the need to encode/decode your data at every intermediary step and you can just handle it as you pass it around before turning it back into a string or image/sound/etc
Mimo
mimo.org › glossary › python › bytes
Python Bytes: Syntax, Usage, and Examples
For instance, compression libraries often accept or return byte arrays. Python bytes provide a fast and reliable way to handle binary data. You can convert between strings and bytes easily using .encode() and .decode(). When you need mutability, use bytearray.
YouTube
youtube.com › mcoding
str vs bytes in Python - YouTube
strings vs. bytes, what's the diff?Strings and bytes are both fundamental types in Python. At a surface level they also appear do be very similar objects. Fr...
Published: February 27, 2023
Views: 78K
Top answer 1 of 2
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Possible duplicate of what is the difference between a string and a byte string
In short, the bytes type is a sequence of bytes that have been encoded and are ready to be stored in memory/disk. There are many types of encodings (utf-8, utf-16, windows-1255), which all handle the bytes differently. The bytes object can be decoded into a str type.
The str type is a sequence of unicode characters. The str needs to be encoded to be stored, but is mutable and an abstraction of the bytes logic.
There is a strong relationship between str and bytes. bytes can be decoded into a str, and strs can be encoded into bytes.
You typically only have to use bytes when you encounter a string in the wild with a unique encoding, or when a library requires it. str , especially in python3, will handle the rest.
More reading here and here
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Sockets is a good case for using bytes. Also you should use bytes to read/write binary data, like image or audio, from a file or a web API. The str type is an immutable sequence of character, which is typically UTF8 encoded. Obviously if your data is not characters, then doing the UTF8 encoding on it will be inefficient and could cause bugs.
Theunterminatedstring
theunterminatedstring.com › python-bits-and-bytes
Python Bits and Bytes - The Unterminated String
May 19, 2018 - Binary values can be stored within the bytes object. This object is immutable and can store raw binary values within the range 0 to 255. It’s constructor is the aptly named bytes().
Top answer 1 of 15
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From python 3.2 you can use to_bytes:
>>> (1024).to_bytes(2, byteorder='big')
b'\x04\x00'
def int_to_bytes(x: int) -> bytes:
return x.to_bytes((x.bit_length() + 7) // 8, 'big')
def int_from_bytes(xbytes: bytes) -> int:
return int.from_bytes(xbytes, 'big')
Accordingly, x == int_from_bytes(int_to_bytes(x)).
Note that the above encoding works only for unsigned (non-negative) integers.
For signed integers, the bit length is a bit more tricky to calculate:
def int_to_bytes(number: int) -> bytes:
return number.to_bytes(length=(8 + (number + (number < 0)).bit_length()) // 8, byteorder='big', signed=True)
def int_from_bytes(binary_data: bytes) -> Optional[int]:
return int.from_bytes(binary_data, byteorder='big', signed=True)
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That's the way it was designed - and it makes sense because usually, you would call bytes on an iterable instead of a single integer:
>>> bytes([3])
b'\x03'
The docs state this, as well as the docstring for bytes:
>>> help(bytes)
...
bytes(int) -> bytes object of size given by the parameter initialized with null bytes
GeeksforGeeks
geeksforgeeks.org › python › byte-objects-vs-string-python
Byte Objects vs String in Python - GeeksforGeeks
July 23, 2025 - In Python 2, both str and bytes are the same typeByte objects whereas in Python 3 Byte objects, defined in Python 3 are "sequence of bytes" and similar to "unicode" objects from Python 2.
Elc
elc.github.io › python-security › chapters › 91_Bytes.html
Bytes Data Type — Python Security
Python 3.6 introduced the secrets module to conveniently generate several types of secure random bytes.
Programiz
programiz.com › python-programming › methods › built-in › bytearray
Python bytearray()
Online Python Online JavaScript Online SQL Online Java Online HTML Online C Online C++ Online C# Online PHP Online Swift Online Kotlin Online TypeScript Online Go Online Rust Online Scala Online Dart Online R Online Ruby ... The bytearray() method returns a bytearray object which is an array of the given bytes.