You need to decode the bytes object to produce a string:
>>> b"abcde"
b'abcde'
# utf-8 is used here because it is a very common encoding, but you
# need to use the encoding your data is actually in.
>>> b"abcde".decode("utf-8")
'abcde'
See: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#bytes.decode