Bitwise ~ Operator

[muzikman]

I am using a byte as an example because in some languages, a small int = 1 byte. 0-255

I don't understand how your example relates to my problem?

What makes you think you are using a byte? I don't think Python has a byte type.

It has "bytes", but there are no bytes in bytes.

>>> x = (5).to_bytes(1, 'big')
>>> x
b'\x05'
>>> type(x)
<class 'bytes'>
>>> x[0]
5
>>> type(x[0])
<class 'int'>

bytes is a list of ints