Using 3.0 (and 2.6) bytearray Objects

So far we’ve focused on str and bytes, since they subsume Python 2’s unicode and str. Python 3.0 has a third string type, though—bytearray, a mutable sequence of integers in the range 0 through 255, is essentially a mutable variant of bytes. As such, it supports the same string methods and sequence operations as bytes, as well as many of the mutable in-place-change operations supported by lists. The bytearray type is also available in Python 2.6 as a back-port from 3.0, but it does not enforce the strict text/binary distinction there that it does in 3.0.

Let’s take a quick tour. bytearray objects may be created by calling the bytearray built-in. In Python 2.6, any string may be used to initialize: