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I want to concatenate two strings like this:

requestData = command + ' ' + data

"data" in my case holds binary data, that should not be opened - it should just glue it to command. But imho python is attempting to open it and it fails with: 

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xbc in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

Is there a way to glue it without opening?

Edit: Python 2.7 Also my data is actualy not utf-8 decode might not help - its binary data.

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  • Which Python version is this? Must be 2.something, but Python 2.7.3 successfully concatenates non-ascii strings: In [1]: 'привет' + ' ' + 'Veseliq' Out[1]: '\xd0\xbf\xd1\x80\xd0\xb8\xd0\xb2\xd0\xb5\xd1\x82 Veseliq'. Commented May 15, 2012 at 9:44
  • Its python 2.7, and the data is misc binary data Commented May 15, 2012 at 9:51
  • 1
    Is command unicode? If yes, encode it first. Commented May 15, 2012 at 10:05
  • how do you initalize your command ? Commented May 15, 2012 at 10:51

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4

Try using http://docs.python.org/library/array.html (with 'B') instead of string

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1 Comment

Sure - it appears that you never intended to use the data as a printable string (in which case I would have recommended to change the encoding used from ASCII to a unicode representation). In that case using string makes little sense and can cause unexpected problems. My suggestion was to use a type that properly represents your intent, and then concatenating items of that type (e.g. using docs.python.org/library/array.html#array.array.extend), 'B' represents unsigned char, which is equivalent to one byte, which seems to be the proper representation if I understand your needs correctly.

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