Convert bytes to a string

Question

I\'m using this code to get standard output from an external program:

>>> from subprocess import *
>>> command_stdout = Popen([\'ls\', \'-l         


        

Answer 1

To interpret a byte sequence as a text, you have to know the corresponding character encoding:

unicode_text = bytestring.decode(character_encoding)

Example:

>>> b'\xc2\xb5'.decode('utf-8')
'µ'

ls command may produce output that can't be interpreted as text. File names on Unix may be any sequence of bytes except slash b'/' and zero b'\0':

>>> open(bytes(range(0x100)).translate(None, b'\0/'), 'w').close()

Trying to decode such byte soup using utf-8 encoding raises UnicodeDecodeError.

It can be worse. The decoding may fail silently and produce mojibake if you use a wrong incompatible encoding:

>>> '—'.encode('utf-8').decode('cp1252')
'—'

The data is corrupted but your program remains unaware that a failure has occurred.

In general, what character encoding to use is not embedded in the byte sequence itself. You have to communicate this info out-of-band. Some outcomes are more likely than others and therefore chardet module exists that can guess the character encoding. A single Python script may use multiple character encodings in different places.

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ls output can be converted to a Python string using os.fsdecode() function that succeeds even for undecodable filenames (it uses sys.getfilesystemencoding() and surrogateescape error handler on Unix):

import os
import subprocess

output = os.fsdecode(subprocess.check_output('ls'))

To get the original bytes, you could use os.fsencode().

If you pass universal_newlines=True parameter then subprocess uses locale.getpreferredencoding(False) to decode bytes e.g., it can be cp1252 on Windows.

To decode the byte stream on-the-fly, io.TextIOWrapper() could be used: example.

Different commands may use different character encodings for their output e.g., dir internal command (cmd) may use cp437. To decode its output, you could pass the encoding explicitly (Python 3.6+):

output = subprocess.check_output('dir', shell=True, encoding='cp437')

The filenames may differ from os.listdir() (which uses Windows Unicode API) e.g., '\xb6' can be substituted with '\x14'—Python's cp437 codec maps b'\x14' to control character U+0014 instead of U+00B6 (¶). To support filenames with arbitrary Unicode characters, see Decode PowerShell output possibly containing non-ASCII Unicode characters into a Python string