I was trying to build this bytes object in Python 3:
b'3\r\n'
so I tried the obvious (for me), and found a weird behaviour:
>>> bytes(3) + b'\r\n'
b'\x00\x00\x00\r\n'
Apparently:
>>> bytes(10)
b'\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'
I’ve been unable to see any pointers on why the bytes conversion works this way reading the documentation. However, I did find some surprise messages in this Python issue about adding format to bytes (see also Python 3 bytes formatting):
http://bugs.python.org/issue3982
This interacts even more poorly with oddities like bytes(int) returning zeroes now
and:
It would be much more convenient for me if bytes(int) returned the ASCIIfication of that int; but honestly, even an error would be better than this behavior. (If I wanted this behavior – which I never have – I’d rather it be a classmethod, invoked like “bytes.zeroes(n)”.)
Can someone explain me where this behaviour comes from?
