Why does Popen.communicate() return b'hi\n' instead of 'hi'?

Question

Can someone explain why the result I want, \"hi\", is preceded with a letter \'b\' and followed with a newline?

I am using Python 3.3

Answer 1

The echo command by default returns a newline character

Compare with this:

print(subprocess.Popen("echo -n hi", \
    shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0])

As for the b preceding the string it indicates that it is a byte sequence which is equivalent to a normal string in Python 2.6+

http://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#literals