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.