Iterate over individual bytes in Python 3

Question

When iterating over a bytes object in Python 3, one gets the individual bytes as ints:

>>> [b for b in b'123']
[49, 50, 51]

How to get 1-length bytes objects instead?

The following is possible, but not very obvious for the reader and most likely performs bad:

>>> [bytes([b]) for b in b'123']
[b'1', b'2', b'3']

Answer 1

If you are concerned about performance of this code and an int as a byte is not suitable interface in your case then you should probably reconsider data structures that you use e.g., use str objects instead.

You could slice the bytes object to get 1-length bytes objects:

L = [bytes_obj[i:i+1] for i in range(len(bytes_obj))]

There is PEP 0467 -- Minor API improvements for binary sequences that proposes bytes.iterbytes() method:

>>> list(b'123'.iterbytes())
[b'1', b'2', b'3']