In python 2.7:
>>> x1= '\xba\xba'
>>> x2=b'\xba\xba'
>>> x1==x2
True
In python 3.4:
>>> x1='\xba\xba'
>>> x2=b'\xba\xba'
>>> x1==x2
False
>>> type(x1)
<class 'str'>
>>> type(x2)
<class 'bytes'>
x1 into x2? x2 into x1?In Python 3.x, use str.encode (str -> bytes) and bytes.decode (bytes -> str) with latin1 encoding (or iso-8859-1):
>>> x1 = '\xba\xba'
>>> x2 = b'\xba\xba'
>>> x1.encode('latin1') == x2
True
>>> x2.decode('latin1') == x1
True
'\xba\xba'.encode('latin1') -> UnicodeDecodeError on Python 2.
'\xba\xba' == b'\xba\xba' (assuming no from __future__ import unicode_literals); no need to encode it. They are both byte strings.Python 3. Anyway, I will specify the version. Thank you for the suggestion.Both x1 and x2 are bytestrings in Python 2. If you compare Unicode and bytes on Python 2; you also get False in this case:
>>> u'\xba\xba' == b'\xba\xba'
__main__:1: UnicodeWarning: Unicode equal comparison failed to convert both arguments to Unicode - interpreting them as being unequal
False
x1 is a Unicode string in Python 3.
You could add from __future__ import unicode_literals to make the code work the same on both Python 2 and 3:
>>> from __future__ import unicode_literals
>>> x1 = '\xab\xab'
>>> type(x1)
<type 'unicode'>
Don't mix bytestrings and Unicode strings.
To convert Unicode string to bytes:
bytestring = unicode_string.encode(character_encoding)
To convert bytes to Unicode string:
unicode_string = bytestring.decode(character_encoding)