all Python 3Strings (str)function

str.encode

encodings

Encode the string to bytes using the given codec (UTF-8 by default).

Syntax

s.encode(encoding='utf-8', errors='strict')

encode() hands back bytes, a different type: it won't concatenate with str, and its len counts bytes rather than characters ('café' is five bytes in UTF-8). Anything outside the chosen codec raises UnicodeEncodeError under errors='strict'; 'ignore' and 'replace' silence it by throwing characters away for good. Going back needs bytes.decode() with the very same codec — the codec cannot be inferred from the data.

Examples

print('abc'.encode())            # → b'abc'
print('café'.encode('utf-8'))    # → b'caf\xc3\xa9'
print('hi'.encode('ascii'))      # → b'hi'

See also

Common errors

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