Read socket data byte by byte and return as a string

Question

I need to read data from socket byte by byte. I try to do with this code:

lineF = ''
for DataByte in client[0].recv(1):
    lineF += DataByte

result lineF must be an data string.

Answer 1

What type of object is client[0]? Assuming it is a socket object from the standard library, then recv() already gives you a bytestring. If you want it as a text string, you would use the .decode() with whatever encoding whoever is sending you the data is using - eg,

 data = client[0].recv(1).decode('utf-8')

EDIT: in the case that, per your comment below, you don't know the length of the stream in advance, you need to keep reading until the data comes back empty. The built-in iter() helps with this:

 def read_socket():
      return client[0].recv(1)

 data = b''.join(iter(read_socket, b''))

Also, if this is the only reason for reading a byte at a time - you can, and probably should, use a larger buffer size. If there's fewer bytes in the stream than the buffer can hold, it will just give you those bytes.