bytestring

English

Etymology

byte +‎ string

Noun

bytestring (plural bytestrings)

1. (programming) A text string treated as a series of single bytes rather than a series of characters of possibly varying storage size.
   • 1994, Richard T. Snodgrass, Marianne Southall Winslett, Association for Computing Machinery. Special Interest Group on Management of Data, Proceedings (page 255)

     However, the underlying file model of these approaches is that of Unix files (i.e., bytestrings), whereas we assume record-structured files with key-based access.

   • 2005, Alex Martelli, Anna Ravenscroft, David Ascher, Python Cookbook:

     Standard Python strings are really bytestrings, and a Python character, being such a string of length 1, is really a byte.