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chr() Function in Python
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Python bytes() method

Last Updated : 02 Jan, 2025
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bytes() method in Python is used to create a sequence of bytes. In this article, we will check How bytes() methods works in Python.

Python 
a = "geeks"   # UTF-8 encoding is used b = bytes(a, 'utf-8')  print(b)

Output
b'geeks'

Table of Content

  • bytes() Method Syntax
  • Using Custom Encoding
  • Convert String to Bytes
  • Converting a List of Integers to Bytes
  • Creating a Bytes Object with a Specific Size

Syntax of bytes()

bytes(]])

Parameters:

source (optional)

  • A string will be encoded into bytes using the specified encoding (default is ‘utf-8’).
  • An iterable will have each element converted into bytes but it must have integers between 0 and 255.
  • An integer creates a bytes object of that size with all elements initialized to 0.

encoding (optional)

This parameter is used when the source is a string. It specifies the encoding format to convert the string into bytes. The default encoding is ‘utf-8’ but you can use other encodings like ‘ascii’, ‘utf-16’, etc.

errors (optional)

Defines how to handle errors during the encoding process.

  • ‘strict‘: Raises a UnicodeEncodeError if there is an error.
  • ‘ignore‘: Ignores characters that can’t be encoded.
  • ‘replace‘: Replaces characters that can’t be encoded with a placeholder (usually a question mark).

Return Type:  

  • return type of the bytes() method is a bytes object. A bytes object is an immutable sequence of integers in the range from 0 to 255.

Using Custom Encoding

If the string contains characters from other languages, we can specify a different encoding:

Python 
a = "गीक्स" b = bytes(a, 'utf-16')    # Converts the string to bytes using UTF-16 encoding print(b)

Output
b'\xff\xfe\x17\t@\t\x15\tM\t8\t'

Convert String to Bytes

Python String to bytes using the bytes() function, for this we take a variable with string and pass it into the bytes() function with UTF-8 parameters. When we pass a string to the bytes() method, we also need to tell Python which “language” (encoding) to use to convert the string.

Python 
s = "Welcome to Geeksforgeeks"  b = bytes(s, 'utf-8')  print(b)

Output
b'Welcome to Geeksforgeeks'

Converting a List of Integers to Bytes

Each number in the list must be between 0 and 255 because each byte can only hold numbers in that range. When we pass a list of numbers to the bytes() method, Python will create a bytes object where each number in the list corresponds to one byte.

Python 
a = [215, 66, 67]     # Converts the list of integers into bytes b = bytes(a)  print(b)

Output
b'\xd7BC'

Creating a Bytes Object with a Specific Size

By passing a single integer to bytes(), Python will create a bytes object of that length, filled with zero values (because a byte is initially 0).

Python 
a = 5    # Creates a bytes object of length 5, with all zero values b = bytes(a)   print(b)

Output
b'\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'

Next Article
chr() Function in Python
author
manjeet_04
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Article Tags :
  • Python
  • python
  • Python-Built-in-functions
  • Python-Data Type
  • python-string
Practice Tags :
  • python
  • python

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