How to convert between bytes and strings in Python 3?

Question

This is a Python 101 type question, but it had me baffled for a while when I tried to use a package that seemed to convert my string input into bytes.

As you will s

Answer 1

The 'mangler' in the above code sample was doing the equivalent of this:

bytesThing = stringThing.encode(encoding='UTF-8')

There are other ways to write this (notably using bytes(stringThing, encoding='UTF-8'), but the above syntax makes it obvious what is going on, and also what to do to recover the string:

newStringThing = bytesThing.decode(encoding='UTF-8')

When we do this, the original string is recovered.

Note, using str(bytesThing) just transcribes all the gobbledegook without converting it back into Unicode, unless you specifically request UTF-8, viz., str(bytesThing, encoding='UTF-8'). No error is reported if the encoding is not specified.