Problem:
You want to perform bitwise boolean operations on bytes()
arrays in Python, but you see an error message like
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for &: 'bytes' and 'bytes'
or
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for |: 'bytes' and 'bytes'
or
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for ^: 'bytes' and 'bytes'
Solution:
Python can’t perform bitwise operations directly on byte arrays. However, you can use the code from How to perform bitwise boolean operations on bytes() in Python3:
def bitwise_and_bytes(a, b): result_int = int.from_bytes(a, byteorder="big") & int.from_bytes(b, byteorder="big") return result_int.to_bytes(max(len(a), len(b)), byteorder="big") def bitwise_or_bytes(a, b): result_int = int.from_bytes(a, byteorder="big") | int.from_bytes(b, byteorder="big") return result_int.to_bytes(max(len(a), len(b)), byteorder="big") def bitwise_xor_bytes(a, b): result_int = int.from_bytes(a, byteorder="big") ^ int.from_bytes(b, byteorder="big") return result_int.to_bytes(max(len(a), len(b)), byteorder="big") # Example usage: a = bytes([0x00, 0x01, 0x02, 0x03]) b = bytes([0x03, 0x02, 0x01, 0xff]) print(bitwise_and_bytes(a, b)) # b'\x00\x00\x00\x03' print(bitwise_or_bytes(a, b)) # b'\x03\x03\x03\xff' print(bitwise_xor_bytes(a, b)) # b'\x03\x03\x03\xfc'