How to remove a range of bytes from a bytes object in python?

Question

I am pretty new to python and sometimes things that seems pretty easy become lot complicated than expected

I am currently using a bytes buffer to read from a socket:

data = self.socket.recv(size)

and then process part of that buffer and need remove it

The thing is that I've been looking for a way to do that and didn't find a clue in the whole evening, I am pretty sure that I am not getting any fair results because of the words involved, or maybe it's not possible

I tried with "del" but got an error saying that it's not supported

Am I doing it the wrong way? Maybe someone could lead me the right way? :)

Answer 1

bytes doesn't support item deletion because it's immutable. To "modify" strings and string-like objects you need to take a copy, so to remove olddata[start:end] do:

newdata = olddata[:start] + olddata[end:]

Of course that's a fair amount of copying, not all of which is necessary, so you might prefer to rework your code a bit for performance. You could use bytearray (which is mutable). Or perhaps you could find a way to work through the buffer (using an index or iterating over its elements), instead of needing to shorten it after each step.

Answer 2

I think I found the proper way, just looking from another perspective:

self.data = self.data[Index:]

just copying what I need to itself again