How do I interpret spaces in python byte arrays

Question

I am receiving some data from a third party and stumbled over a curious feature of the byte array output:

Some byte arrays I receive have spaces in the string which is printed to console, and I do not know how to interpet these.

a = b'\x14 \x00'
b = b'\x14\x00'

print(len(a), ':', a[0], a[1], a[2])
print(len(b), ':', b[0], b[1])

results in the output

3 : 20 32 0
2 : 20 0

Where does the 32 (which is '\x20' in hex) come from?
ASCII space is 32, but why is this interpreted as such?

Answer 1

32 is the decimal value for the string " " (a space). In Python, a bytes object is an iterable of bytes 0-255, which can be represented by \x14 for 0x14, or ASCII characters like a, b, or c. Or a combination of the two, as you've seen in your example.

list(b'\x01\b02')   # [1, 2]
list(b'ab')         # [97, 98] (decimal values for 'a' and 'b')
list(b'\x12ab\x44') # [18, 97, 98, 68]