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Encoding / Decoding

Explore how to effectively encode and decode strings in Python 3 by understanding the role of Unicode and byte strings. Learn to handle encoding errors and use flags to manage non-ASCII characters. This lesson helps you confidently work with text encoding for multilingual applications.

Back in the good ol’ days, we quickly learned that we could not decode a unicode string and we could not encode a str type either. If we tried to take a unicode string and decode it to ASCII (i.e. convert it to a byte string), we would get a UnicodeEncodeError.

Decoding

Here we have a simple example and we will test it with both Python2 and Python3.

Testing the code with Python2

Python
print(u"\xa0".decode("ascii"))

In ...