Literal bytes

As with strings they have a simple, literal form delimited by either single or double quotes, although for literal bytes the opening quote must be preceded by a lower-case b:

>>> b'data'
b'data'
>>> b"data"
b'data'

There is also a bytes constructor, but it has fairly complex behavior and we defer coverage of it to the second book in this series, The Python Journeyman. At this point in our journey, it's sufficient for us to recognize the bytes literals and understand that they support many of the same operations as str, such as indexing and splitting:

>>> d = b'some bytes'
>>> d.split()
[b'some', b'bytes']

You'll see that the split() method returns a list of of bytes objects.