How do I convert a Python 3 byte-string variable into a regular string? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

Convert bytes to a string in Python 3 (23 answers)

Closed 5 years ago.

I have read in an XML email attachment with

bytes_string=part.get_payload(decode=False)

The payload comes in as a byte string, as my variable name suggests.

I am trying to use the recommended Python 3 approach to turn this string into a usable string that I can manipulate.

The example shows:

str(b'abc','utf-8')

How can I apply the b (bytes) keyword argument to my variable bytes_string and use the recommended approach?

The way I tried doesn't work:

str(bbytes_string, 'utf-8')

• Josh Correia: Does this answer your question? Convert bytes to a string

Answer 1

You had it nearly right in the last line. You want

str(bytes_string, 'utf-8')

because the type of bytes_string is bytes, the same as the type of b'abc'.

• Shubhamoy: str(bytes_string, 'utf-8', 'ignore') Errors can be ignored by passing the third parameter.
• Toby Speight: That looks like it should be a comment to pylang's answer (which addresses handling invalid input). If (you believe that) there's nothing wrong with bytes_string, why would you want to ignore errors?
• alper: I am getting following error with your approach: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xbf in position 0: invalid start byte for the following bytes string b'\xbf\x8cd\xba\x7f\xe0\xf0\xb8t\xfe.TaFJ\xad\x100\x07p\xa0\x1f90\xb7P\x8eP\x90\x06)0' @TobySpeight
• Toby Speight: Well @alper, that's not a valid UTF-8 string, so what did you expect?

Answer 2

Call decode() on a bytes instance to get the text which it encodes.

str = bytes.decode()

• Juha Untinen: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf6 in position 230: invalid start byte
• tommy.carstensen: @JuhaUntinen your encoding is probably not utf-8.
• Dr. Failov: How to filter (skip) non-UTF8 charachers from array?
• Yılmaz Alpaslan: Use str = bytes.decode("utf-8) to use a diffirent encoding. Replace utf-8 to the encoding you want.

Answer 3

How to filter (skip) non-UTF8 charachers from array?

To address this comment in @uname01's post and the OP, ignore the errors:

Code

>>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", errors="ignore")
'abc'

---

Details

From the docs, here are more examples using the same errors parameter:

>>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "replace")
'\ufffdabc'
>>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "backslashreplace")
'\\x80abc'
>>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "strict") 
Traceback (most recent call last):
 ...
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0:
 invalid start byte

The errors argument specifies the response when the input string can’t be converted according to the encoding’s rules. Legal values for this argument are 'strict' (raise a UnicodeDecodeError exception), 'replace' (use U+FFFD, REPLACEMENT CHARACTER), or 'ignore' (just leave the character out of the Unicode result).

Answer 4

UPDATED:

TO NOT HAVE ANY b and quotes at first and end

How to convert bytes as seen to strings, even in weird situations.

As your code may have unrecognizable characters to 'utf-8' encoding, it's better to use just str without any additional parameters:

some_bad_bytes = b'\x02-\xdfI#)'
text = str( some_bad_bytes )[2:-1]
print(text)

Output: \x02-\xdfI

if you add 'utf-8' parameter, to these specific bytes, you should receive error.

As PYTHON 3 standard says, text would be in utf-8 now with no concern.

• Glen Thompson: result is "b'\\x02-\\xdfI#)'" which probably isn't what he wants
• Seyfi: @GlenThompson it is just an example for unwanted conditions, that may happen. I use this specific text intentionally. If you mean text has a b in first of it, then I updated answer
• Diego Fernando Murillo Valenci: so very thanks i'm searching for a way for remove the b'' of an string that have ansi character without encoding and lossing the characters, i'm new in python and don't know than i can reduce an array from start and beginning using indexes :O