For example, I have a string like this(return value of subprocess.check_output):
>>> b'a string'
b'a string'
Whatever I did to it, it is always printed with the annoying b' before the string:
>>> print(b'a string')
b'a string'
>>> print(str(b'a string'))
b'a string'
Does anyone have any ideas about how to use it as a normal string or convert it into a normal string?
Decode it.
>>> b'a string'.decode('ascii')
'a string'
To get bytes from string, encode it.
>>> 'a string'.encode('ascii')
b'a string'
ascii because the given string was made with ascii letters. You don't need to specify encoding if the encoding is utf-8 (default in Python 3.x according to str.encode, bytes.decode doc-string)
import locale and then os_encoding = locale.getpreferredencoding(). This way, we can decode using my_b_string.decode(os_encoding)sys.getfilesystemencoding(), sys.stdin.encoding, sys.stdout.encoding. IMHO, using those automatic encoding detection could solve problem because the sub-program (OP is using subprocess) could be written other way to determine encoding (or even hard-coded). Thanks for feedback, anyway.sys.getfilesystemencoding() returns the name of the encoding used to convert between Unicode filenames and bytes filenames and is strongly dependant on operating system you are using. AFAIK, this function is used to convert to the system’s preferred representation. That means that it will not infer the codification used by the console that can be obtained using the aforementioned locale.getpreferredencoding() functionIf the answer from falsetru didn't work you could also try:
>>> b'a string'.decode('utf-8')
'a string'
See the official encode() and decode() documentation from codecs library. utf-8 is the default encoding for the functions, but there are severals standard encodings in Python 3, like latin_1 or utf_32.
