Python String encode method

Question

In Python, there is an encode method in unicode strings to encode from unicode to byte string. There is a decode method in string to do the reverse.

But I'm confused what the encode method in string for?

Answer 1

It's useful for non-text codecs.

>>> 'Hello, world!'.encode('hex')
'48656c6c6f2c20776f726c6421'
>>> 'Hello, world!'.encode('base64')
'SGVsbG8sIHdvcmxkIQ==\n'
>>> 'Hello, world!'.encode('zlib')
'x\x9c\xf3H\xcd\xc9\xc9\xd7Q(\xcf/\xcaIQ\x04\x00 ^\x04\x8a'

Answer 2

It first decodes to Unicode using the default encoding, then encodes back to a byte string.

>>> import sys
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
>>> sys.setdefaultencoding('latin-1')
>>> '\xc4'.encode('utf-8')
'\xc3\x84'

Here, '\xc4' is Latin-1 for Ä and '\xc3\x84' is UTF-8 for Ä.