How to remove the 'b' prefix from a String in Python

# Table of Contents

1. Remove the 'b' prefix from a string in Python
2. Remove the 'b' prefix from a string using str()
3. Remove the 'b' prefix from a string using repr()

# Remove the 'b' prefix from a string in Python

Use the bytes.decode() method to remove the b prefix from a bytes object by converting it to a string.

The decode() method will return a string decoded from the given bytes object and will remove the b prefix.

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my_bytes = 'bobbyhadz.com'.encode('utf-8')
print(my_bytes)  # 👉️ b'bobbyhadz.com'
print(type(my_bytes))  # 👉️ <class 'bytes'>


string = my_bytes.decode('utf-8')
print(string)  # 👉️ bobbyhadz.com
print(type(string))  # 👉️ <class 'str'>

Bytes objects are always prefixed with b'', so to remove the prefix, we have to convert the bytes to a string.

The bytes.decode() method returns a string decoded from the given bytes. The default encoding is utf-8.

Conversely, the str.encode() method returns an encoded version of the string as a bytes object. The default encoding is utf-8.

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my_bytes = 'bobbyhadz.com'.encode('utf-8')
print(my_bytes)  # 👉️ b'bobbyhadz.com'

string = my_bytes.decode('utf-8')
print(string)  # 👉️ bobbyhadz.com

In other words, you can use the str.encode() method to go from str to bytes and bytes.decode() to go from bytes to str.

# Remove the 'b' prefix from a string using str()

Alternatively, you can use the str() class.

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my_bytes = bytes('bobbyhadz.com', encoding='utf-8')
print(my_bytes)  # 👉️ b'bobbyhadz.com'
print(type(my_bytes))  # 👉️ <class 'bytes'>


string = str(my_bytes, encoding='utf-8')
print(string)  # 👉️ bobbyhadz.com
print(type(string))  # 👉️ <class 'str'>

The str() class returns a string version of the given object. If an object is not provided, the class returns an empty string.

The syntax for using the bytes() class is the same. The class returns a bytes object, so the b prefix is added.

You can view all of the standard encodings in this table of the official docs.

Some of the common encodings are ascii, latin-1 and utf-32.

When decoding a bytes object, we have to use the same encoding that was used to encode the string to a bytes object.

# Remove the 'b' prefix from a string using repr()

If for some reason, you need to remove the b prefix in a hacky way, try using the repr() function with string slicing.

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my_bytes = bytes('bobbyhadz.com', encoding='utf-8')
print(my_bytes)  # 👉️ b'bobbyhadz.com'

string = repr(my_bytes)[2:-1]
print(string)  # 👉️ bobbyhadz.com

The repr() function returns the canonical string representation of the object.

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my_bytes = bytes('bobbyhadz.com', encoding='utf-8')
print(my_bytes)  # 👉️ b'bobbyhadz.com'

print(repr(my_bytes)) # 👉️ b'bobbyhadz.com'

Once we have the bytes object converted to a string, we can use string-slicing to remove the b prefix.

The syntax for string slicing is my_str[start:stop:step].

Python indexes are zero-based, so the first character in a string has an index of 0, and the last character has an index of -1 or len(my_str) - 1.

The slice my_str[2:-1] starts at index 2 and goes up to, but not including the last character in the string.

We basically exclude the b character and the quotes.

# Additional Resources

You can learn more about the related topics by checking out the following tutorials:

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