How do chr() and ord() relate to str and bytes?

Question

I found the Python 3 documentation on chr and ord to be a little unclear as to how they relate to the two main textual data types: str and bytes. Or maybe I'm overthinking it.

Here is what I think probably happens, but can you let me know if I'm right?

• ord() takes as input a single-character str and returns an int. The input is a str just like any other str in Python 3. In particular, it is not bytes encoded in some specific Unicode format like UTF-8, rather it represents Unicode Code Points in Python's internal str format.
• chr() takes as input an int, and returns a single character str. The returned str is just like any other str in Python, and similarly is not a specific encoding using bytes.
• At no point do either ord() or chr() deal with bytes, nor do they deal with specific Unicode formats like UTF-8, they are only dealing with Python's internal str representation which deals more abstractly with Unicode Code Points.

Answer 1

You are right.

ord() and chr() deal only with single-character strings.

Their documentation is quite clear about that:

>>> help(ord)
ord(c, /)
    Return the Unicode code point for a one-character string.

>>> help(chr)
chr(i, /)
    Return a Unicode string of one character with ordinal i; 0 <= i <= 0x10ffff.

Use str.encode / bytes.decode for conversion to/from bytes.