Addition of explicit “count and byte initialised sequence” constructors

To replace the discouraged behavior of creating zero-filled bytes-like objects from the basic constructors (i.e. bytes(1) –> b'\x00'), this PEP proposes the addition of an explicit fromsize alternative constructor as a class method on both bytes and bytearray whose first argument is the count, and whose second argument is the fill byte to use (defaults to \x00):

>>> bytes.fromsize(3)
b'\x00\x00\x00'
>>> bytearray.fromsize(3)
bytearray(b'\x00\x00\x00')
>>> bytes.fromsize(5, b'\x0a')
b'\x0a\x0a\x0a\x0a\x0a'
>>> bytearray.fromsize(5, fill=b'\x0a')
bytearray(b'\x0a\x0a\x0a\x0a\x0a')

fromsize will behave just as the current constructors behave when passed a single integer, while allowing for non-zero fill values when needed.

Addition of explicit “single byte” constructors

As binary counterparts to the text chr function, this PEP proposes the addition of an explicit fromint alternative constructor as a class method on both bytes and bytearray:

>>> bytes.fromint(65)
b'A'
>>> bytearray.fromint(65)
bytearray(b'A')

These methods will only accept integers in the range 0 to 255 (inclusive):

>>> bytes.fromint(512)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: integer must be in range(0, 256)

>>> bytes.fromint(1.0)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'float' object cannot be interpreted as an integer

The documentation of the ord builtin will be updated to explicitly note that bytes.fromint is the primary inverse operation for binary data, while chr is the inverse operation for text data, and that bytearray.fromint also exists.

Behaviorally, bytes.fromint(x) will be equivalent to the current bytes([x]) (and similarly for bytearray). The new spelling is expected to be easier to discover and easier to read (especially when used in conjunction with indexing operations on binary sequence types).

As a separate method, the new spelling will also work better with higher order functions like map.

These new methods intentionally do NOT offer the same level of general integer support as the existing int.to_bytes conversion method, which allows arbitrarily large integers to be converted to arbitrarily long bytes objects. The restriction to only accept positive integers that fit in a single byte means that no byte order information is needed, and there is no need to handle negative numbers. The documentation of the new methods will refer readers to int.to_bytes for use cases where handling of arbitrary integers is needed.

Addition of “getbyte” method to retrieve a single byte

This PEP proposes that bytes and bytearray gain the method getbyte which will always return bytes:

>>> b'abc'.getbyte(0)
b'a'

If an index is asked for that doesn’t exist, IndexError is raised:

>>> b'abc'.getbyte(9)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
IndexError: index out of range

Addition of optimised iterator methods that produce bytes objects

This PEP proposes that bytes and bytearray gain an optimised iterbytes method that produces length 1 bytes objects rather than integers:

for x in data.iterbytes():
    # x is a length 1 ``bytes`` object, rather than an integer

For example:

>>> tuple(b"ABC".iterbytes())
(b'A', b'B', b'C')

Why not rely on sequence repetition to create zero-initialised sequences?

Zero-initialised sequences can be created via sequence repetition:

>>> b'\x00' * 3
b'\x00\x00\x00'
>>> bytearray(b'\x00') * 3
bytearray(b'\x00\x00\x00')

However, this was also the case when the bytearray type was originally designed, and the decision was made to add explicit support for it in the type constructor. The immutable bytes type then inherited that feature when it was introduced in PEP 3137.

This PEP isn’t revisiting that original design decision, just changing the spelling as users sometimes find the current behavior of the binary sequence constructors surprising. In particular, there’s a reasonable case to be made that bytes(x) (where x is an integer) should behave like the bytes.fromint(x) proposal in this PEP. Providing both behaviors as separate class methods avoids that ambiguity.

Current Workarounds

After nearly a decade, there’s seems to be no consensus on the best workarounds for byte iteration, as demonstrated by Get single-byte bytes objects from bytes objects.

Omitting the originally proposed builtin function

When submitted to the Steering Council, this PEP proposed the introduction of a bchr builtin (with the same behaviour as bytes.fromint), recreating the ord/chr/unichr trio from Python 2 under a different naming scheme (ord/bchr/chr).

The SC indicated they didn’t think this functionality was needed often enough to justify offering two ways of doing the same thing, especially when one of those ways was a new builtin function. That part of the proposal was therefore dropped as being redundant with the bytes.fromint alternate constructor.

Developers that use this method frequently will instead have the option to define their own bchr = bytes.fromint aliases.

Scope limitation: memoryview

Updating memoryview with the new item retrieval methods is outside the scope of this PEP.