Why do the two codes below generate different outputs?

Question

a = [b'food']
b= list(b'food')

Output

a = [b'food']; b = [102, 111, 111, 100]

• Patrick Haugh: The distinction here is that [b'food'] is a list containing a single element, which is a bytes object, while list(b'food') takes an iterable and makes a list out of it. Since a bytes object is an iterable, list makes a list of the elements in the iterable.

Answer 1

list(...) takes an iterable as parameter. b'food' is of type bytes, and so list(...) creates a list from the bytes in it (b'f', b'o', ...).

The equivalent of [b'food'] using list(...) would be:

b = list((b'food',))

Answer 2

Because list() take iterable items as parameters and unpack them.

list("123") => ["1", "2", "3"]

Answer 3

The first one creates a list with one element (b'food').

Meanwhile the list function will convert a given iterable object to a list with a copy of its elements. So it creates a list with the binary representation of each letter of 'food'.