How to Convert Int to Bytes in Python 2 and Python 3

1. Python 2.7 and 3 Compatible int to bytes Conversion Method
2. Python 3 Only int to bytes Conversion Methods
3. Performance Comparison

Conversion from int to bytes is the reverse operation of conversion from bytes to int that is introduced in the last HowTo tutorial. Most of the int-to-bytes methods introduced in this article are the reverse methods of bytes-to-int methods.

Python 2.7 and 3 Compatible int to bytes Conversion Method

You could use pack function in the Python struct module to convert the integer to bytes in the specific format.

>>> import struct
>>> struct.pack("B", 2)
'\x02'
>>> struct.pack(">H", 2)
'\x00\x02'
>>> struct.pack("<H", 2)
'\x02\x00'

The first argument in the struct.pack function is the format string that specifies the bytes format like byte length, sign, byte order (little or big endian), etc.

Python 3 Only int to bytes Conversion Methods

Use bytes to Convert int to bytes

As indicated in the last article, bytes is a built-in data type from Python 3. You could easily use bytes to convert the integer 0~255 to bytes data type.

>>> bytes([2])
b'\x02'

>>> bytes(3)
b'\x00\x00\x00'

Use int.to_bytes() Method to Convert int to bytes

From Python3.1, a new integer class method int.to_bytes() is introduced. It is the reverse conversion method of int.from_bytes() as discussed in the last article.

>>> (258).to_bytes(2, byteorder="little")
b'\x02\x01'
>>> (258).to_bytes(2, byteorder="big")
b'\x01\x02'
>>> (258).to_bytes(4, byteorder="little", signed=True)
b'\x02\x01\x00\x00'
>>> (-258).to_bytes(4, byteorder="little", signed=True)
b'\xfe\xfe\xff\xff'

The first argument is the converted bytes data length, the second argument byteorder defines the byte order to be little or big-endian, and the optional argument signed determines whether two’s complement is used to represent the integer.

Performance Comparison

In Python 3, you have 3 ways to convert int to bytes,

• bytes() method
• struct.pack() method
• int.to_bytes() method

We will check the execution time of each method to compare their performance, and finally give you the recommendation if you want to increase your code execution speed.

>>> import timeint
>>> timeit.timeit('bytes([255])', number=1000000)
0.31296982169325455
>>> timeit.timeit('struct.pack("B", 255)', setup='import struct', number=1000000)
0.2640925447800839
>>> timeit.timeit('(255).to_bytes(1, byteorder="little")', number=1000000)
0.5622947660224895

Therefore, please use struct.pack() function to perform the int-to-bytes conversion to get the best execution performance, although it is already introduced in Python 2 branch.