How do I convert a Python 3 byte-string variable into a regular string?

Call decode() on a bytes instance to get the text which it encodes.

str = bytes.decode()

How to filter (skip) non-UTF8 charachers from array?

To address this comment in @uname01's post and the OP, ignore the errors:

Code

>>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", errors="ignore")
'abc'

---

Details

From the docs, here are more examples using the same errors parameter:

>>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "replace")
'\ufffdabc'
>>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "backslashreplace")
'\\x80abc'
>>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "strict")  
Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0:
  invalid start byte

The errors argument specifies the response when the input string can’t be converted according to the encoding’s rules. Legal values for this argument are 'strict' (raise a UnicodeDecodeError exception), 'replace' (use U+FFFD, REPLACEMENT CHARACTER), or 'ignore' (just leave the character out of the Unicode result).

You had it nearly right in the last line. You want

str(bytes_string, 'utf-8')

because the type of bytes_string is bytes, the same as the type of b'abc'.