On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 6:39 PM, Joel Goldstick <joel.goldstick at gmail.com> wrote: >> "f" is the same as \x66; nothing has been changed. > > really? I would expect that \x66 = 0110 0110 and f = 1111 The f here is the ASCII character f, not the hex digit f: >>> bin(ord(b'f')) '0b1100110'