Python 3's encode() and decode() methods

Question

In Python 3 there are str and bytes types. To convert a bytes type into a str type, one would call the decode() method on an instance and vice versa. I am confused as to why this is, why is it not encode()? As I understand it, internally the actual bytes in memory are being encoded into an encoding (UTF-8 in Python's case).

• John La Rooy: You can think of encode/decode as serialise/deserialise of unicode objects (which is the str type in Python3)
• Kevin J. Chase: By far the best introduction to this subject is Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 lecture, "Pragmatic Unicode, or, How Do I Stop the Pain?" (on You Tube).

Answer 1

The bytes are the encoding. You need to decode them in order to get the text they encode. How Python encodes the text as bytes internally is... not your problem.