Bitwise Slicing

[bowlofred]

If I went with

bits = [1 if x == "1" else 0 for x in f"{result:08b}"[-8:]] # takes only 8 LSB in case result > 2**8

Would that not simply leave me with a string called 'bits' - so effectively just masking out the lower 4 bits of result?

No, it's just compact. The first part (the f-string) converts the byte to the 8 LSB bits as a string object. f"{result:08b}"[-8:]

The next part goes through each character of the string one-by-one and converts it to a list of numbers, either 0 or 1. So the MSB is index 0 and the LSB is index 7, via a list comprehension. Expanding the loop, it would look like:

temp_list = []
for x in f"{result:08b}"[-8:]:
    if x == "1":
        temp_list.append(1)
    else:
        temp_list.append(0)
bits = temp_list

So at the end, you've got the list [1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1]

It looks like there's also a PyPi module called bitstring. It could be that it has some functions that would be useful.