How To Consistently Ignore One Byte From A String

I am dealing with a program that consistently returns many byte objects. Frequently it returns the null b'00' in the middle of strings. I want to completely ignore that, (say if

Solution 1:

Usually you'd use a filtered version of the object, for example:

In [63]: test
Out[63]: 'hello\x00world'
In [68]: for my_bytes in filter(lambda x: x != b'\x00', test):
   ....:     print(my_bytes)
   ....:
h
e
l
l
o
w
o
r
l
d

Note I used my_bytes instead of bytes, which is a built-in name you'd rather not overwrite.

Similar you can also simply construct a filtered bytes object for further processing:

In [62]: test = b'hello\x00world'
In [63]: test
Out[63]: 'hello\x00world'
In [64]: test_without_nulls = bytes(filter(lambda x: x != b'\x00', test))
In [65]: test_without_nulls
Out[65]: 'helloworld'

I usually use bytes objects as it does not share the interface with strings in python 3. Certainly not byte arrays.

Solution 2:

You can use a membership test using in:

>>> b'\x00' in bytes([1, 2, 3])
False
>>> b'\x00' in bytes([0, 1, 2, 3])
True

Here b'\x00' produces a bytes object with a single NULL byte (as opposed to b'00' which produces an object of length 2 with two bytes with integer values 48).

I call these things bytes objects, sometimes byte strings, but the latter usually in context of Python 2 only. A bytearray is a separate, distinct type (a mutable version of the bytes type).

Solution 3:

If you have a list in python, you can do

list = [x for x in originallist if x is not None]