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 The Racket Reference 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" > (parameterize ([current-locale "C"])  ; C locale supports ASCII,     (bytes->string/locale #"\316\273")) ; only, so... bytes->string/locale: byte string is not a valid encoding for the current locale: #"\316\273" > (let ([cvt (bytes-open-converter "cp1253" ; Greek code page                                    "UTF-8")]         [dest (make-bytes 2)])     (bytes-convert cvt #"\353" 0 1 dest)     (bytes-close-converter cvt)     (bytes->string/utf-8 dest)) "λ"

Byte Strings in The Racket Reference provides more on byte strings and byte-string procedures.