How to convert strings to bytes in Python
A byte object is a sequence of bytes. These byte objects are machine-readable and can be directly stored on the disk. Strings, on the other hand, are in human-readable form and need to be encoded so that they can be stored on a disk.
There are several different types of encodings that can map text to the disk. The most popular ones are the ASCII and UTF-8 encoding techniques.
Convert strings to bytes
In this section, we will explore two different method to convert a string to bytes.
Using the bytes() class
We can use the built-in Bytes class in Python to convert a string to bytes: simply pass the string as the first input of the constructor of the Bytes class and then pass the encoding as the second argument.
Printing the object shows a user-friendly textual representation, but the data contained in it is in bytes.
string = "Hello World"# string with encoding 'utf-8'arr = bytes(string, 'utf-8')arr2 = bytes(string, 'ascii')print(arr,'\n')# actual bytes in the the stringfor byte in arr:print(byte, end=' ')print("\n")for byte in arr2:print(byte, end=' ')
Line 4: We defined a variable with the name of
arr, where we stored theutf-8encoded string.Line 5: We defined a variable with the name of
arr2, where we stored theasciiencoded string.Line 10&11: We defined a loop to iterate over each byte in
arrand print it out, followed by a space, effectively displaying each byte individually.Line 13&14: We defined a loop to iterate over each byte in
arr2and print it out, followed by a space, effectively displaying each byte individually.
Using the encode() method
In this section we will use the encode() a built-in method to convert strings to bytes.
string = "Hello World"# Convert string to bytes using encode() methodarr = string.encode('utf-8')arr2 = string.encode('ascii')print(arr,'\n')# Actual bytes in the string (UTF-8)for byte in arr:print(byte, end=' ')print("\n")# Actual bytes in the string (ASCII)for byte in arr2:print(byte, end=' ')
Line 4: We defined a variable with the name of
arr, where we stored theutf-8an encoded string that we generated by using theencode()method.Line 5: We defined a variable with the name of
arr2, where we stored theasciian encoded string that we generated by using theencode()method.
