Bit masking in Python

Question

I have a byte (from some other vendor) where the potential bit masks are as follows:

value1 = 0x01 value2 = 0x02 value3 = 0x03 value4 = 0x04 value5 = 0x05 value6 = 0x06

Answer 1

Most of your value* constants aren't actually bit masks, only value7 and value8 are. I'd define another bit mask to extract the lower bits, so I would have three bit masks in total:

mask0 = 0x07
mask1 = 0x40
mask2 = 0x80

Now your function becomes

def parse_byte(byte):
    return byte & mask2, byte & mask1, byte & mask0

I did not convert the results to bool -- I don't see why this should be necessary. When checking the returned value with if, it will be implicitly converted to bool anyway.

Also note that

format(value,'b').zfill(8)

can be simplified to

format(value,'08b')