Created my first bot today

Got asked to create an automated bot using Mastodon APIs so I did :)

I'll say more about it another day but I while creating it I thought about something that lots of people I know get confused: bytes and bits, so I make a short code snippets to convert and showcase the differences.

def bytes_to_bits(byte_count: int) -> int:
    return byte_count * 8

def bits_to_bytes(bit_count: int) -> int:
    # floor division (no half-bytes possible)
    return bit_count // 8

def bytes_to_bits(byte_seq: bytes, sep: str = " ") -> str:
    """
    Convert a sequence of bytes into a string of bits.
    Each byte is 8 bits, padded with leading zeros.

    :param byte_seq: bytes object (b'abc' or b'\xff\x10')
    :param sep: separator string between bytes (default: space)
    :return: bit string (e.g. '01100001 01100010')
    """
    return sep.join(f"{byte:08b}" for byte in byte_seq)


def bits_to_bytes(bit_str: str, sep: str = " ") -> bytes:
    """
    Convert a bit string back into raw bytes.

    :param bit_str: string of bits (with optional separators)
    :param sep: separator used between bytes (default: space)
    :return: bytes object
    """
    # Remove separators if present
    parts = bit_str.split(sep) if sep else [bit_str]
    return bytes(int(part, 2) for part in parts if part)

print(bytes_to_bits(512))      # 4096 bits
print(bits_to_bytes(4096))     # 512 bytes

data = b"A"  # ASCII 65
bitstring = bytes_to_bits(data)
print(bitstring)  # '01000001'

data2 = b"Hi"
print(bytes_to_bits(data2, sep="|"))
# '01001000|01101001'

# Back to bytes
recovered = bits_to_bytes(bitstring)
print(recovered)  # b'A'

recovered2 = bits_to_bytes("01001000|01101001", sep="|")
print(recovered2.decode())  # 'Hi'

Since API calls use network, those are usually stored in byte size chunks and each bit is important. b"string" will create a byte version of that string where each character is a byte. I added a bit separator so each bit value can be used individually if needed. I hope you have fun with binary
~IO