When I first started messing around with python strings and unicode, It took me awhile to understand the jargon of decode and encode too, so here’s my post from here that may help:
Think of decoding as what you do to go from a regular bytestring to unicode and encoding as what you do to get back from unicode. In other words:
You de-code a str
to produce a unicode
string (in Python 2)
and en-code a unicode
string to produce a str
(in Python 2)
So:
unicode_char = u'\xb0'
encodedchar = unicode_char.encode('utf-8')
encodedchar
will contain your unicode character, displayed in the selected encoding (in this case, utf-8
).
The same principle applies to Python 3. You de-code a bytes
object to produce a str
object. And you en-code a str
object to produce a bytes
object.