How to find null byte in a string in Python?

While it boils down to using split('\x00') a convenience wrapper might be nice.

def readlines(f, bufsize):
    buf = ""
    data = True
    while data:
        data = f.read(bufsize)
        buf += data
        lines = buf.split('\x00')
        buf = lines.pop()
        for line in lines:
            yield line + '\x00'
    yield buf + '\x00'

then you can do something like

with open('myfile', 'rb') as f:
    mylist = [item for item in readlines(f, 524288)]

This has the added benefit of not needing to load the entire contents into memory before splitting the text.

Python doesn't treat NUL bytes as anything special; they're no different from spaces or commas. So, split() works fine:

>>> my_string = "Health\x00experience\x00charactername\x00"
>>> my_string.split('\x00')
['Health', 'experience', 'charactername', '']

Note that split is treating \x00 as a separator, not a terminator, so we get an extra empty string at the end. If that's a problem, you can just slice it off:

>>> my_string.split('\x00')[:-1]
['Health', 'experience', 'charactername']