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

As mentioned before, echo hi actually does return hi\n, which it is an expected behavior.

But you probably want to just get the data in a "right" format and not deal with encoding. All you need to do is pass universal_newlines=True option to subprocess.Popen() like so:

>>> import subprocess
>>> print(subprocess.Popen("echo hi",
                           shell=True,
                           stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                           universal_newlines=True).communicate()[0])
hi

This way Popen() will replace these unwanted symbols by itself.