Python-bytes() vs struct.pack()

Question

I'm just curious here, but I have been using bytes() to convert things to bytes ever since I learned python. It was until recently that I saw struct.pack(). I didn't bother learning how to use it because I thought It did essentially did the same thing as bytes(). But it appears many people prefer to use struct.pack(). Why? what are the advantages of one over the other?

Answer 1

bytes() does literally what the name implies:

Return a new “bytes” object, which is an immutable sequence of integers in the range 0 <= x < 256

struck.pack() does something very different:

This module performs conversions between Python values and C structs represented as Python strings

While for some inputs these might be equivalent, they are not at all the same operation. struct.pack() is essentially producing a byte-string that represents a POD C-struct in memory. It's useful for serializing/deserializing data.