3.5 Bytes and Byte Strings
A byte is an exact integer between 0 and 255, inclusive. The byte? predicate recognizes numbers that represent bytes.
Examples: |
| > (byte? 0) |
#t |
| > (byte? 256) |
#f |
A byte string is similar to a string – see Strings (Unicode) – but its content is a sequence of bytes instead of characters. Byte strings can be used in applications that process pure ASCII instead of Unicode text. The printed form of a byte string supports such uses in particular, because a byte string prints like the ASCII decoding of the byte string, but prefixed with a #. Unprintable ASCII characters or non-ASCII bytes in the byte string are written with octal notation.
Reading Strings in Reference: Racket documents the fine points of the syntax of byte strings.
Examples: |
| > #"Apple" |
#"Apple" |
| > (bytes-ref #"Apple" 0) |
65 |
| > (make-bytes 3 65) |
#"AAA" |
| > (define b (make-bytes 2 0)) |
| > b |
#"\0\0" |
| > (bytes-set! b 0 1) |
| > (bytes-set! b 1 255) |
| > b |
#"\1\377" |
The display form of a byte string writes its raw bytes to the current output port (see Input and Output). Technically, display of a normal (i.e,. character) string prints the UTF-8 encoding of the string to the current output port, since output is ultimately defined in terms of bytes; display of a byte string, however, writes the raw bytes with no encoding. Along the same lines, when this documentation shows output, it technically shows the UTF-8-decoded form of the output.
Examples: |
| > (display #"Apple") |
Apple |
| > (display "\316\273") ; same as "λ" |
λ |
| > (display #"\316\273") ; UTF-8 encoding of λ |
λ |
For explicitly converting between strings and byte strings, Racket supports three kinds of encodings directly: UTF-8, Latin-1, and the current locale’s encoding. General facilities for byte-to-byte conversions (especially to and from UTF-8) fill the gap to support arbitrary string encodings.
Examples: | ||||||
| > (bytes->string/utf-8 #"\316\273") | ||||||
"λ" | ||||||
| > (bytes->string/latin-1 #"\316\273") | ||||||
"λ" | ||||||
| ||||||
bytes->string/locale: byte string is not a valid encoding | ||||||
for the current locale: #"\316\273" | ||||||
| ||||||
"λ" |