Python reading file in binary, binary data to string?

Question

I'm trying to learn Python and currently doing some exercises online. One of them involves reading zip files.

When I do:

import zipfile
zp=zipfile.ZipFile('MyZip.zip')
print(zp.read('MyText.txt'))

it prints:

b'Hello World'

I just want a string with "Hello World". I know it's stupid, but the only way I could think of was to do:

import re
re.match("b'(.*)'",zp.read('MyText.txt'))

How am I supposed to do it?

• mowwwalker: @John, it makes it "b'Hello World'"
• mowwwalker: I'm dumbfounded that this didn't get flagged as a possible duplicate and closed in seconds.
• Brandon Rhodes: Given that I sometimes feel that Python is growing too complex, and has grown too many conflicting ways of doing the exact same thing over the years, I am terribly pleased that we three produced textually the exact same answer to this question independently of each other. :)

Answer 1

You need to decode the raw bytes in the string into real characters. Try running .decode('utf-8') on the value you are getting back from zp.read() before printing it.

• mowwwalker: Thanks. It seems all three of you just about tied for the answer, but you got it first.

Answer 2

You need to decode the bytes to text first.

print(zp.read('MyText.txt').decode('utf-8'))

Answer 3

Just decode the bytes:

print(zp.read('MyText.txt').decode('UTF-8'))