How to Convert Bytes to Strings in Python

Converting bytes into readable strings in Python is an effective way to work with raw bytes fetched from files, databases, or APIs. You can do this in just three steps using the bytes.decode() method. This guide lets you convert byte data into clean text, giving you a result similar to what’s shown in the following example:

>>> binary_data = bytes([100, 195, 169, 106, 195, 160, 32, 118, 117])
>>> binary_data.decode(encoding="utf-8")
'déjà vu'