Python 3: Standard way to surpress the b' prefix when printing [duplicate]

Question

I recently started to use Python 3 and I understood that in this version, the print() function assumes that the string is unicode and not ASCII (8-bit chars).

Well, I know that my strings are sometimes ASCII, but I really don't care about it. Why should I always get an annoying b' prefix printed to the screen?

Is there a way to turn off this "feature" ?

My code:

proc = subprocess.Popen(diff_cmd, shell = True, stdout = subprocess.PIPE, stderr = subprocess.STDOUT)
while proc.poll() is None:
    output = proc.stdout.readlines()
    for line in output:
        print(line)

Answer 1

You need to be explicit about this yourself.

You need to specify the encoding and decode the bytes into Unicode (ASCII encoding): line.decode('ascii'). If object are sometimes bytes and sometimes Unicode then you need to handle this accordingly.

After that you can pass it to print().