Python program to convert bytes to string

Learn to encode and decode in Python.

Python program to convert bytes to string

Difference between bytes and strings in Python

In Python 3, a string is a sequence of characters. A string can’t be directly stored on disk.

A byte string is a sequence of "bytes" - things that can be stored on disk. So to store strings, they need to be converted to a byte string.

The process of converting a string to a sequence of bytes is called Encoding.

How to convert bytes to a string?

If encoding is the process of converting string to bytes, decoding is the process to convert bytes back to strings.

Luckily, Python 3 has a decode() function that you can use directly to convert bytes to strings.

Code

byte_string = b'Good job Pylenin \xE2\x9C\x85'.decode("utf-8")

Output

>>> Good job Pylenin ?

As you can see, we are using utf-8 encoding format. This could be a difficult task as there are quite a lot of such encoding formats and you need to know which applies in the particular case in order to make the conversion, since a different encoding might map the same bytes to a different string.

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