all Python 3codecsfunction

codecs.getdecoder()

codec registry

Returns a codec's stateless decoder function: it takes bytes and returns a pair (string, number of bytes consumed). Same as lookup(name).decode.

Syntax

decode = codecs.getdecoder(encoding)

The result is a tuple, not str, a common slip when replacing bytes.decode. A stateless decoder cannot wait for more input: a multi-byte character split by a chunk boundary from a socket or file raises UnicodeDecodeError. For chunked data use getincrementaldecoder or iterdecode; for complete bytes, bytes.decode is enough.

Examples

import codecs
dec = codecs.getdecoder('utf-8')
print(dec(b'abc'))  # → ('abc', 3)
chunk = 'я'.encode('utf-8')[:1]
try:
    dec(chunk)
except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
    print(e.reason)  # → unexpected end of data

See also

Common errors

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