What does the 'b' character do in front of a string literal?

Question

Apparently, the following is the valid syntax:

my_string = b\'The string\'

I would like to know:

1. What does this b

Answer 1

In addition to what others have said, note that a single character in unicode can consist of multiple bytes.

The way unicode works is that it took the old ASCII format (7-bit code that looks like 0xxx xxxx) and added multi-bytes sequences where all bytes start with 1 (1xxx xxxx) to represent characters beyond ASCII so that Unicode would be backwards-compatible with ASCII.

>>> len('Öl')  # German word for 'oil' with 2 characters
2
>>> 'Öl'.encode('UTF-8')  # convert str to bytes 
b'\xc3\x96l'
>>> len('Öl'.encode('UTF-8'))  # 3 bytes encode 2 characters !
3