I'm trying to convert a bytearray to and from a string. Why does the following not work? The encode seems to add an extra slash. Am I using the wrong encoding? I'm using python3.6
In [19]: b'\x88'.decode('unicode_escape')
Out[19]: '\x88'
In [20]: '\x88'.encode('unicode_escape')
Out[20]: b'\\x88'
When to use raw_unicode_escape mode
The backslash character is escaped so is written as \\. If you don't want that try the 'raw_unicode_escape' codec.
In the editor here, when answering your question, if I write \\ you see \ in the response so I actually had to write \\\\. Try it yourself to see what I mean (or edit this answer to see what I mean).
This is what I actually had to write above
The backslash character is escaped so is written as \\\\.
If you don't want that try the 'raw_unicode_escape' codec.
In the editor here, when answering your question, if I write \\\\
you see \\ in the response so I actually had to write
\\\\\\\\. Try it yourself to see what I mean (or edit this answer
to see what I mean).
By escaping the backspash the unicode_escape codec guards against problems like that.
You are using here bytes not bytearray
So, if you want to encode and decode keeping the '\x', you can use
'\x88'.encode('raw_unicode_escape')
b'\x88'.decode('unicode_escape')
If what you have is a single value bytearray like this:
barray = bytearray([0x88])
you can get the string of this byte this way:
s = format(barray[0], '02x')
