9. PEP 3137: The memoryview Object¶

The memoryview object provides a view of another object’s memory content that matches the bytes type’s interface.

>>> import string
>>> m = memoryview(string.letters)
>>> m
<memory at 0x37f850>
>>> len(m)           # Returns length of underlying object
52
>>> m[0], m[25], m[26]   # Indexing returns one byte
('a', 'z', 'A')
>>> m2 = m[0:26]         # Slicing returns another memoryview
>>> m2
<memory at 0x37f080>

The content of the view can be converted to a string of bytes or a list of integers:

>>> m2.tobytes()
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
>>> m2.tolist()
[97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, ... 121, 122]
>>>

memoryview objects allow modifying the underlying object if it’s a mutable object.

>>> m2[0] = 75
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: cannot modify read-only memory
>>> b = bytearray(string.letters)  # Creating a mutable object
>>> b
bytearray(b'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ')
>>> mb = memoryview(b)
>>> mb[0] = '*'         # Assign to view, changing the bytearray.
>>> b[0:5]              # The bytearray has been changed.
bytearray(b'*bcde')
>>>