Performing String and Bytes Data Conversion in Python3.x

In Python 3.5 String and Bytes are not same as in Python2.7, the manual conversion between them need to do using and encode<==> decode method.

String===>(encode)==>Byte===>(decode)==>String

String Encode:

encode(…) method of builtins.str instance
S.encode(encoding=’utf-8′, errors=’strict’) -> bytes

Bytes Decode:

decode(…) method of builtins.bytes instance

B.decode(encoding=’utf-8′, errors=’strict’) -> str

While doing Python 2.7 to Python 3.5 migration the most common issue is related to Text(String and Bytes) data type, One of such common issue is:

TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not ‘str’

Error occurs due to the type mismatch of bytes and string.

For solving this error encode the string data to bytes format by calling string_data.encode().

Python 3.x the unicode type has been renamed as str and the older str type has been replaced by bytes.

See the below example  (in Python 2.x)

#Bytes and String data are same.

bytes==str  #True

help(bytes) #class str(basestring)

help(str) #class str(basestring)


#String and Unicode data are different.

str==unicode # False
help(str) #class str(basestring)

help(unicode) #class unicode(basestring)

The same code in Python3.x

#Bytes and String data are different.

bytes==str  #False

help(bytes) #class bytes(object)
help(str) #class str(object)

#Unicode data type not exists.

unicode#NameError: name 'unicode' is not defined

That’s all for today. I hope this blog will help you. I’d be very grateful if you’d write your opinions, comments, and suggestions to keep the page updated and interesting.

You may also like our post on using Python  ftplib library for File transfer.