Tal Einat wrote:
You can already do bitwise operations on bytes, and retrieving the relevant byte and using single-byte operations on it is simple enough. As I see it, the major underlying problem here is that byte-arrays are immutable, since what you really want is to be able to change a single byte of the array in-place. In general, Python's byte arrays and strings are very ill suited for dealing with data which isn't byte-based, and definitely horrible at building or modifying data streams.
Careful with your terminology here. In Python 3.x, the following two types both exist: bytes: immutable sequence of integers between 0 and 255 inclusive bytearray: similar to bytes, but mutable The operations ~x, x&y, x|y and x^y make sense for both bytes and bytearray. The augmented assignment operators only make sense for bytearray. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------