Convert bytes to a string

Decode the byte string and turn it in to a character (Unicode) string.

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Python 3:

encoding = 'utf-8'
b'hello'.decode(encoding)

or

str(b'hello', encoding)

---

Python 2:

encoding = 'utf-8'
'hello'.decode(encoding)

or

unicode('hello', encoding)

Decode the bytes object to produce a string:

>>> b"abcde".decode("utf-8") 
'abcde'

The above example assumes that the bytes object is in UTF-8, because it is a common encoding. However, you should use the encoding your data is actually in!