B in Front of String in Python

This tutorial will discuss the b" statement in Python.

Use the b" Statement in Python

The b" notation is used to specify a bytes string in Python. Compared to the regular strings, which have ASCII characters, the bytes string is an array of byte variables where each hexadecimal element has a value between 0 and 255.

We can also encode regular strings into bytes strings with the built-in encode() function. The program below shows us how to encode regular strings into bytes strings with the encode() function.

string = 'This is a string'
print(string.encode())

Output:

b'This is a string'

We encoded the regular string This is a string into a bytes string format with the encode() function in the code above. We can also encode a string into a bytes string format with the b" statement. The following code snippet shows us how we can do that.

string = b'This is a string'
print(string)

Output:

b'This is a string'

Here, the string variable is not a regular string; instead, it is a bytes string.