How to convert between bytes and strings in Python 3?

Question

This is a Python 101 type question, but it had me baffled for a while when I tried to use a package that seemed to convert my string input into bytes.

As you will see below I found the answer for myself, but I felt it was worth recording here because of the time it took me to unearth what was going on. It seems to be generic to Python 3, so I have not referred to the original package I was playing with; it does not seem to be an error (just that the particular package had a .tostring() method that was clearly not producing what I understood as a string...)

My test program goes like this:

import mangler                                 # spoof package

stringThing = """
<Doc>
    <Greeting>Hello World</Greeting>
    <Greeting>你好</Greeting>
</Doc>
"""

# print out the input
print('This is the string input:')
print(stringThing)

# now make the string into bytes
bytesThing = mangler.tostring(stringThing)    # pseudo-code again

# now print it out
print('
This is the bytes output:')
print(bytesThing)

The output from this code gives this:

This is the string input:

<Doc>
    <Greeting>Hello World</Greeting>
    <Greeting>你好</Greeting>
</Doc>


This is the bytes output:
b'
<Doc>
    <Greeting>Hello World</Greeting>
    <Greeting>xe4xbdxa0xe5xa5xbd</Greeting>
</Doc>
'

So, there is a need to be able to convert between bytes and strings, to avoid ending up with non-ascii characters being turned into gobbledegook.

Answer 1

The 'mangler' in the above code sample was doing the equivalent of this:

bytesThing = stringThing.encode(encoding='UTF-8')

There are other ways to write this (notably using bytes(stringThing, encoding='UTF-8'), but the above syntax makes it obvious what is going on, and also what to do to recover the string:

newStringThing = bytesThing.decode(encoding='UTF-8')

When we do this, the original string is recovered.

Note, using str(bytesThing) just transcribes all the gobbledegook without converting it back into Unicode, unless you specifically request UTF-8, viz., str(bytesThing, encoding='UTF-8'). No error is reported if the encoding is not specified.