bytes vs str

Question

bytes vs str

Accepted Answer

str is a sequence of Unicode code points - you think in terms of characters and symbols. bytes is a sequence of integers from 0 to 255, representing raw binary data. Converting between them requires an explicit encoding: 'hello'.encode('utf-8') gives b'hello', and b'hello'.decode('utf-8') gives 'hello' back. A common mistake is mixing them, which raises a TypeError because Python 3 will not silently coerce one to the other.