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

b is the byte representation and \n is the result of echo output.

Following will print only the result data

import subprocess
print(subprocess.Popen("echo hi", shell=True,stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0].decode('utf-8').strip())