how to use python string encode() with example

Python string encode() method with example

The encode() method in Python is used to convert a string into bytes. By default, Python uses utf-8 encoding.

How to use the encode() method:

# Create a string
s = "Hello, World!"

# Encode the string
encoded_s = s.encode()

# Print the result
print(encoded_s)

Output:

b'Hello, World!'

You can also specify the encoding type. For instance, to encode a string into bytes using ASCII encoding, you would do.

# Create a string
s = "Hello, World!"

# Encode the string using ASCII encoding
encoded_s = s.encode('ascii')

# Print the result
print(encoded_s)

If the string contains characters that are not supported by the encoding (like special or non-English characters), encoding will raise an error. To avoid this, you can set the errors parameter to ignore, replace, or xmlcharrefreplace to handle encoding errors. Here’s an example:

# Create a string with a special character
s = "Hello, Wörld!"

# Encode the string using ASCII encoding and ignore errors
encoded_s = s.encode('ascii', errors='ignore')

# Print the result
print(encoded_s)

Output:

b'Hello, Wrld!'

As you see, the special character ‘ö’ is removed in the output.

Example 1

 Encoding with replace error handling.

# Create a string with a special character
s = "Python is fün!"

# Encode the string using ASCII encoding and replace unsupported characters with a question mark
encoded_s = s.encode('ascii', errors='replace')

# Print the result
print(encoded_s)

Output:

b'Python is f?n!'

Example 2

Encoding with xmlcharrefreplace error handling.

# Create a string with a special character
s = "Python is fän!"

# Encode the string using ASCII encoding and replace unsupported characters with their XML character reference
encoded_s = s.encode('ascii', errors='xmlcharrefreplace')

# Print the result
print(encoded_s)
Output:
b'Python is fän!'

Example 3

Encoding with a different character set.

# Create a string
s = "Pythonは楽しいです！"

# Encode the string using a different character set (Japanese Shift JIS)
encoded_s = s.encode('shift_jis')

# Print the result
print(encoded_s)
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