What does the "0b" mean at the begining of the byte 0b1100010?

Question

As part of a small python project I'm working on, I needed to convert text to a binary string. To accomplish this I used

list(map(bin,bytearray(message,'utf8')))

The result was 0b1100010 and I get the 1100010 part, but what does the 0b part mean?

Answer 1

This is how Python tells you what base the number is:

Base 2 looks like this:

0b111010

Base 16 looks like this:

0x...

Base 8 looks like this:

0...

and etc.

Hope it helps!

Answer 2

0b is the Python prefix for the representation of binary numbers.

For example:

>>> bin(1024)  # Convert an integer number to a binary string
'0b10000000000'