What does decoding mean in python?

Python String encode()

Python string encode() function is used to encode the string using the provided encoding. This function returns the bytes object. If we don’t provide encoding, “utf-8” encoding is used as default.

Python Bytes decode()

Python bytes decode() function is used to convert bytes to string object. Both these functions allow us to specify the error handling scheme to use for encoding/decoding errors. The default is ‘strict’ meaning that encoding errors raise a UnicodeEncodeError. Some other possible values are ‘ignore’, ‘replace’ and ‘xmlcharrefreplace’. Let’s look at a simple example of python string encode() decode() functions.

str_original = 'Hello'

bytes_encoded = str_original.encode(encoding='utf-8')
print(type(bytes_encoded))

str_decoded = bytes_encoded.decode()
print(type(str_decoded))

print('Encoded bytes =', bytes_encoded)
print('Decoded String =', str_decoded)
print('str_original equals str_decoded =', str_original == str_decoded)

Output:

<class 'bytes'>
<class 'str'>
Encoded bytes = b'Hello'
Decoded String = Hello
str_original equals str_decoded = True

Above example doesn’t clearly demonstrate the use of encoding. Let’s look at another example where we will get inputs from the user and then encode it. We will have some special characters in the input string entered by the user.

str_original = input('Please enter string data:\n')

bytes_encoded = str_original.encode()

str_decoded = bytes_encoded.decode()

print('Encoded bytes =', bytes_encoded)
print('Decoded String =', str_decoded)
print('str_original equals str_decoded =', str_original == str_decoded)

Output:

Please enter string data:
aåb∫cçd∂e´´´ƒg©1¡
Encoded bytes = b'a\xc3\xa5b\xe2\x88\xabc\xc3\xa7d\xe2\x88\x82e\xc2\xb4\xc2\xb4\xc2\xb4\xc6\x92g\xc2\xa91\xc2\xa1'
Decoded String = aåb∫cçd∂e´´´ƒg©1¡
str_original equals str_decoded = True

You can checkout complete python script and more Python examples from our GitHub Repository.

Reference: str.encode() API Doc, bytes.decode() API Doc

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Description

Python string method decode() decodes the string using the codec registered for encoding. It defaults to the default string encoding.

Syntax

Str.decode(encoding='UTF-8',errors='strict')

Parameters

• encoding − This is the encodings to be used. For a list of all encoding schemes please visit: Standard Encodings.

• errors − This may be given to set a different error handling scheme. The default for errors is 'strict', meaning that encoding errors raise a UnicodeError. Other possible values are 'ignore', 'replace', 'xmlcharrefreplace', 'backslashreplace' and any other name registered via codecs.register_error().

Return Value

Decoded string.

Example

#!/usr/bin/python

Str = "this is string example....wow!!!";
Str = Str.encode('base64','strict');

print "Encoded String: " + Str
print "Decoded String: " + Str.decode('base64','strict')

Result

Encoded String: dGhpcyBpcyBzdHJpbmcgZXhhbXBsZS4uLi53b3chISE=
Decoded String: this is string example....wow!!!

python_strings.htm

To represent a unicode string as a string of bytes is known as encoding. To convert a string of bytes to a unicode string is known as decoding. You typically encode a unicode string whenever you need to use it for IO, for instance transfer it over the network, or save it to a disk file. You typically decode a string of bytes whenever you receive string data from the network or from a disk file.

 To encode a string using a given encoding you can do the following:

 >>>u'æøå'.encode('utf8')
'\xc3\x83\xc2\xa6\xc3\x83\xc2\xb8\xc3\x83\xc2\xa5'

To decode astring(using the same encoding used to encode it), you need to call decode(encoding). For example:

>>>'\xc3\x83\xc2\xa6\xc3\x83\xc2\xb8\xc3\x83\xc2\xa5'.decode('utf8')
u'\xc3\xa6\xc3\xb8\xc3\xa5'

This string in utf8 encoding is equivalent to u'æøå'

Updated on 30-Sep-2019 07:32:24

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