Chunking bytes (not strings) in Python 2 and 3

Question

This is turning out to be trickier than I expected. I have a byte string:

data = b\'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz\'

I want to read this data in c

Answer 1

Using bytes with bytearray would work for both if your string length was divisible by n or you pass a non empty string as the fillvalue:

def grouper(iterable, n, fillvalue=None):
    "Collect data into fixed-length chunks or blocks"
    # grouper('ABCDEFG', 3, 'x') --> ABC DEF Gxx
    args = [iter(iterable)] * n
    return ((bytes(bytearray(x))) for x in zip_longest(fillvalue=fillvalue, *args))

py3:

In [20]: import sys

In [21]: sys.version
Out[21]: '3.4.3 (default, Oct 14 2015, 20:28:29) \n[GCC 4.8.4]'

In [22]: print(list(grouper(data,2)))
[b'ab', b'cd', b'ef', b'gh', b'ij', b'kl', b'mn', b'op', b'qr', b'st', b'uv', b'wx', b'yz']

Py2:

In [6]: import sys

In [7]: sys.version
Out[7]: '2.7.6 (default, Jun 22 2015, 17:58:13) \n[GCC 4.8.2]'

In [8]: print(list(grouper(data,2)))
['ab', 'cd', 'ef', 'gh', 'ij', 'kl', 'mn', 'op', 'qr', 'st', 'uv', 'wx', 'yz']

If you passed an empty string you could filter them out:

def grouper(iterable, n, fillvalue=None):
    "Collect data into fixed-length chunks or blocks"
    # grouper('ABCDEFG', 3, 'x') --> ABC DEF Gxx
    args = [iter(iterable)] * n
    return ((bytes(bytearray(filter(None, x)))) for x in zip_longest(fillvalue=fillvalue, *args))

Which will work for any length string.

In [29]: print(list(grouper(data,4)))
[b'abcd', b'efgh', b'ijkl', b'mnop', b'qrst', b'uvwx', b'yz']

In [30]: print(list(grouper(data,3)))
[b'abc', b'def', b'ghi', b'jkl', b'mno', b'pqr', b'stu', b'vwx', b'yz']