I have the following piece of code:
test = "é".encode('utf-8')
print(test)
Now, this would give us: b'\xc3\xa9', as expected. Now I would actually have "\xc3\xa9" as a string. How can I achieve this?
I looked at encoding and decoding methods in Python, but unfortunately they do not result in the desired outcome.
you can use both repr() or str()
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
test = "é".encode('utf-8')
print(test)
# using repr()
my_string = repr(test)[2:-1]
print(my_string)
# using str()
my_string = str(test)[2:-1]
print(my_string)
output:
b'\xc3\xa9'
\xc3\xa9
\xc3\xa9
Just a little background to this.
The repr() function will call the test.__repr__() method of the bytes object test. And the str() function will call the test.__str__() method of the bytes object test, if __str__() is defined, else it will call the __repr__() method instead.
This can easily be seen, consider this code:
class MyClass(object):
def __init__(self):
pass
def __repr__(self):
return 'repr'
def __str__(self):
return 'str'
m = MyClass()
print(str(m))
print(repr(m))
output:
str
repr
if there is no .__str__() defined, consider the following code:
class MyClass(object):
def __init__(self):
pass
def __repr__(self):
return 'repr'
#def __str__(self):
# return 'str'
m = MyClass()
print(str(m))
print(repr(m))
output:
repr
repr
More information about __str__() and __repr__() can be found in the Datamodel documentation
repr(test)?