What is memoryview in Python 3

Question

I am new to Python. Recently I came across the concept of memoryview. I am not able to understand it. Can someone help me understand it in an easy way?

Answer 1

Before we get into what memory views are, we need to first understand about Python's Buffer Protocol.

What is a Buffer Protocol?

Simply said, buffer protocol provides a way to access the internal data of an object. This internal data is a memory array or a buffer.

Buffer protocol allows one object to expose its internal data (buffers) and the other to access those buffers without intermediate copying.

This protocol is only accessible to us at the C-API level and not using our normal code base.

So, in order to expose the same protocol to normal Python code base, memory views are present.

What is a memory view?

Memory view is a safe way to expose the buffer protocol in Python.

It allows you to access the internal buffers of an object by creating a memory view object.

The memoryview() method returns a memory view object of the given argument.