TypeError: Strings must be encoded before hashing (Python)

TypeError: Strings must be encoded before hashing (Python) #

The Python "TypeError: Strings must be encoded before hashing" occurs when we pass a string to a hashing algorithm. To solve the error, use the encode() method to encode the string to a bytes object, e.g. my_str.encode('utf-8').

Here is an example of how the error occurs.

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import hashlib

my_str = 'some long string'

# ⛔️ TypeError: Strings must be encoded before hashing
my_hash = hashlib.sha256(my_str).hexdigest()

We used sha256() to create a SHA-256 hash object and passed a string to it, which caused the error.

To solve the error, pass a bytes object to the method instead, e.g. my_str.encode('utf-8').

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import hashlib

my_str = 'some long string'

# ✅ encode str to bytes
my_hash = hashlib.sha256(my_str.encode('utf-8')).hexdigest()

# 👇️ 884b1cd6959c81bc443b50a6cb38813ecb21e20d05690aa2109014e5f8ecb8f6
print(my_hash)

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

If you have a string literal, and not a string stored in a variable, you can prefix the string with b to encode it to a bytes object.

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import hashlib

my_hash = hashlib.sha256(b'some long string').hexdigest()

# 👇️ 884b1cd6959c81bc443b50a6cb38813ecb21e20d05690aa2109014e5f8ecb8f6
print(my_hash)

You can get the digest of the concatenation of the data fed to the hash object by using the digest() or hexdigest() methods.

If you aren't sure what type of object a variable stores, use the built-in type() class.

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my_bytes = 'hello'.encode('utf-8')

print(type(my_bytes))  # 👉️ <class 'bytes'>
print(isinstance(my_bytes, bytes))  # 👉️ True


my_str = 'hello'

print(type(my_str))  # 👉️ <class 'str'>
print(isinstance(my_str, str))  # 👉️ True

The type class returns the type of an object.

The isinstance function returns True if the passed in object is an instance or a subclass of the passed in class.