parsing question

[bowlofred]

That's not one character "\xffp", that's two bytes. The first is '\xff' (which I print as "ff") and the second is "p" (which I print as 70).

>>> b'\xff' + b'\x70'
b'\xffp'
>>> len(b'\xffp')
2

If the bytes in the bytestring have some meaning (like every pair represents something), then that would change how you parse it. All I've done is take all the bytes and display them with their hex code. The default python print statement does similar, but if the byte is in the ASCII range, it replaces it with the ASCII character.