Published: 09 March 2021, 18:00
Types str
and bytes
are immutable. As we learned in previous posts, +
is optimized for str
but sometimes you need a fairly mutable type. For such cases, there is bytearray
type. It is a “hybrid” of bytes
and list
:
b = bytearray(b'hello, ')
b.extend(b'@pythonetc')
b
# bytearray(b'hello, @pythonetc')
b.upper()
# bytearray(b'HELLO, @PYTHONETC')
The type bytearray
has all methods of both bytes
and list
except sort
:
set(dir(bytearray)) ^ (set(dir(bytes)) | set(dir(list)))
# {'__alloc__', '__class_getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__reversed__', 'sort'}
If you’re looking for reasons why there is no bytearray.sort
, there is the only answer we found: stackoverflow.com/a/22783330/8704691.