How to Convert Bytes to String in Python

John on June 08, 2021

To convert the data type bytes to a string in Python, use the .decode() function and set the encoding in the first argument, which will most likely be utf-8.

byte_str = b'abcde'

string = byte_str.decode("utf-8")

print(string)
type(string)
type(byte_str)

abcde
str
bytes

In the example above we have converted the data type bytes to str with utf-8 encoding.

Note – .decode() does not modify the original variable so you will need to store the result in a new one.