Python Language Unicode and bytes Basics
Example
In Python 3 str is the type for unicode-enabled strings, while bytes is the type for sequences of raw bytes.
type("f") == type(u"f") # True, <class 'str'>
type(b"f") # <class 'bytes'>
In Python 2 a casual string was a sequence of raw bytes by default and the unicode string was every string with "u" prefix.
type("f") == type(b"f") # True, <type 'str'>
type(u"f") # <type 'unicode'>
Unicode to bytes
Unicode strings can be converted to bytes with .encode(encoding).
Python 3
>>> "£13.55".encode('utf8')
b'\xc2\xa313.55'
>>> "£13.55".encode('utf16')
b'\xff\xfe\xa3\x001\x003\x00.\x005\x005\x00'
Python 2
in py2 the default console encoding is sys.getdefaultencoding() == 'ascii' and not utf-8 as in py3, therefore printing it as in the previous example is not directly possible.
>>> print type(u"£13.55".encode('utf8'))
<type 'str'>
>>> print u"£13.55".encode('utf8')
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc2' in...
# with encoding set inside a file
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>>> print u"£13.55".encode('utf8')
£13.55
If the encoding can't handle the string, a `UnicodeEncodeError` is raised:
>>> "£13.55".encode('ascii')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xa3' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Bytes to unicode
Bytes can be converted to unicode strings with .decode(encoding).
A sequence of bytes can only be converted into a unicode string via the appropriate encoding!
>>> b'\xc2\xa313.55'.decode('utf8')
'£13.55'
If the encoding can't handle the string, a UnicodeDecodeError is raised:
>>> b'\xc2\xa313.55'.decode('utf16')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/Users/csaftoiu/csaftoiu-github/yahoo-groups-backup/.virtualenv/bin/../lib/python3.5/encodings/utf_16.py", line 16, in decode
return codecs.utf_16_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-16-le' codec can't decode byte 0x35 in position 6: truncated data
