String encoding / data conversion

Enables passing Unicode text to binary-mode I/O, network protocols, and cryptographic APIs that require bytes.

File I/O: writing text to a file opened in binary mode ('wb') Networking: sending string data over a socket or HTTP connection Cryptography: preparing text input for hashing or encryption functions

File I/O Networking Cryptography Data serialization

string_to_encode.encode('encoding_name')

... .encode('...')

string_to_encode: str, encoding_name: str (e.g., 'utf-8')

• open file in binary mode json.dumps base64.b64encode hashlib.sha256

• .encode() (default UTF-8) .encode('latin-1') bytes(string
• encoding)

Forgetting to encode before writing to binary file (TypeError) Assuming .encode() returns a string Calling .encode() on an already bytes object

str.decode('utf-8') – converts bytes back to string codecs.encode(text, encoding) – alternative encoding function

Coming from languages where strings are bytes by default (e.g., C) you may forget the encoding step Coming from languages with a different default encoding (e.g., Latin-1) you may produce mojibake if you omit the encoding

• text encoding
• bytes conversion
• encode/decode pair

The result is a bytes object; cannot be concatenated with strings. The errors argument handles invalid characters. UTF-8 can encode all Unicode code points.

Ensures a safe binary representation of text for storage or transmission.

Turn text into bytes with UTF-8 to send it over the wire.

Default encoding is UTF-8; omitting the argument uses UTF-8 (Python 3).

Use codecs.encode(text, encoding) or bytes(text, encoding) for more control