How do I convert a Python 3 byte-string variable into a regular string?
Python 3.xStringType ConversionPython 3.x Problem Overview
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')
Python 3.x Solutions
Solution 1 - Python 3.x
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'.
Solution 2 - Python 3.x
Call decode() on a bytes instance to get the text which it encodes.
str = bytes.decode()
Solution 3 - Python 3.x
> 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).
Solution 4 - Python 3.x
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.