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

You need to decode the byte string and turn it in to a character (Unicode) string.

On Python 2

encoding = 'utf-8'
'hello'.decode(encoding)

or

unicode('hello', encoding)

On Python 3

encoding = 'utf-8'
b'hello'.decode(encoding)

or

str(b'hello', encoding)