Question

I captured the standard output of an external program into a bytes object:

>>> from subprocess import * >>> stdout = Popen(['ls', '-l'], stdout=PIPE).communicate()[0] >>> stdout b'total 0\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file1\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file2\n' 

I want to convert that to a normal Python string, so that I can print it like this:

>>> print(stdout) -rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file1 -rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file2 

How do I convert the bytes object to a str with Python 3?

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_{See Best way to convert string to bytes in Python 3? for the other way around.}

Answer 1

Decode the bytes object to produce a string:

>>> b"abcde".decode("utf-8") 'abcde' 

The above example assumes that the bytes object is in UTF-8, because it is a common encoding. However, you should use the encoding your data is actually in!