On 1/7/2014 6:13 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Does anyone know what the rationale behind making byte-string indexing
return an int rather than a byte-string of length one?
That is, given b = b'xyz', b[1] returns 121 rather than b'y'.
This former is the normal behavior of sequences, the latter is peculiar
to strings, because there is no separate character class. A byte is a
count n, 0 <= n < 256 and bytes and bytearrays are sequences of bytes.
It was ultimately Guido's decision after some discussion and debate on,
I believe, the py3k list. I do not remember enough to be any more specific.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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