Python program to convert a string to a sequence of byte

Python program to convert a string to a sequence of bytes:

Converting a string to a sequence of bytes is called encoding. A sequence of bytes or a byte object can be stored directly on the disk. We can’t directly store a string on disk. For that, we need to convert a string to a sequence of bytes or we need to encode the string.

Method 1: Using bytes() method:

bytes is an inbuilt method in python and we can use it to convert a string to byte array.

This method is defined as below:

bytes([src[,encoding[,err]]])

Here,

all the three parameters are optional.
src is the source we are using to convert to a byte object. In this example, it is a string.
encoding is the encoding that we want to use with the source.
err is the action to perform if the encoding fails.

Example of string to bytes array:

Let’s take a look at the below program:

given_string = 'Hello'

arr_utf_8 = bytes(given_string, 'utf-8')
arr_utf_16 = bytes(given_string, 'utf-16')
arr_ascii = bytes(given_string, 'ascii')

print('utf-8: ')
for byte in arr_utf_8:
    print(byte, end=' ')
print()

print('utf-16: ')
for byte in arr_utf_16:
    print(byte, end=' ')
print()

print('ascii: ')
for byte in arr_ascii:
    print(byte, end=' ')
print()

Here,

we used utf-8, utf-16 and ascii encodings for the same string.

If you run this program, it will print the below output:

utf-8: 
72 101 108 108 111 
utf-16: 
255 254 72 0 101 0 108 0 108 0 111 0 
ascii: 
72 101 108 108 111

Method 2: Using string.encode:

Python string comes with a method to encode it to a byte object. This is defined as below:

str.encode(encoding, err)

Here,

encoding is the encoding to use. By default it is utf-8
err is a error handling scheme. It is strict by default.

Let’s change the above program to use string.encode:

given_string = 'Hello'

arr_utf_8 = given_string.encode('utf-8')
arr_utf_16 = given_string.encode('utf-16')
arr_ascii = given_string.encode('ascii')

print('utf-8: ')
for byte in arr_utf_8:
    print(byte, end=' ')
print()

print('utf-16: ')
for byte in arr_utf_16:
    print(byte, end=' ')
print()

print('ascii: ')
for byte in arr_ascii:
    print(byte, end=' ')
print()

It will print the same output.

CodeVsColor

Python program to convert a string to a sequence of byte