I'm just curious here, but I have been using bytes() to convert things to bytes ever since I learned python. It was until recently that I saw struct.pack(). I didn't bother learning how to use it because I thought It did essentially did the same thing as bytes(). But it appears many people prefer to use struct.pack(). Why? what are the advantages of one over the other?
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2 Answers
bytes() does literally what the name implies:
Return a new “bytes” object, which is an immutable sequence of integers in the range 0 <= x < 256
struck.pack() does something very different:
This module performs conversions between Python values and C structs represented as Python strings
While for some inputs these might be equivalent, they are not at all the same operation. struct.pack() is essentially producing a byte-string that represents a POD C-struct in memory. It's useful for serializing/deserializing data.
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They do two different things; compare bytes(1234) with struct.pack("!H", 1234). The first just provides a 4-byte string representation of the number bytes object with 1,234 null bytes; the second provides a two-byte string with the (big-endian) value of the integer.
(Edit: Struck out irrelevant Python 2 definition of bytes(1234).)
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chepner
Yes, I missed that at the time.