using I/O ports on ATmega2560

Projects Programming
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Hi
Is there a way to access the I/O ports byte wise rather than bitwise using digitalRead or digitalWrite.

I want to be able to set an entire I/O port to either input or output and also to write and read bytes with a single instruction no have to cycle through digialReads for each pin.
eg PADR = 0xff to set all output high rather than have to iterate digitalWrites for each bit.

Thanks in advance

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