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How to Convert String to Bytes in Python

Last Updated : April 27, 2025

To convert a string into bytes in Python, you can use the built-in methods encode() and bytes(), each offering different levels of flexibility and ease of use.

Convert string to bytes using encode() method

The encode() is an inbuilt method in Python that is used to encode the given string based on the specified encoding technique. The default encoding technique is UTF-8.

Syntax

The syntax of the encode() method is:

string.encode(encoding=encoding, errors=errors)

Example

test_str = "include_help"
print(type(test_str))

test_bytes = test_str.encode()
print(test_bytes)

print(type(test_bytes))

The output of the above example is:

<class 'str'>
b'include_help'
<class 'bytes'>

In Python3, the first parameter of encode() defaults to 'utf-8'. This approach is also supposedly faster because the default argument results in NULL in the C code.

Convert string to bytes using bytes() method

The bytes() is also an inbuilt method in Python that returns a bytes object. The method converts string objects into bytes objects.

Syntax

The syntax of the bytes() method is:

bytes(str, encoding, error)

Example

test_str = "include_help"

test_bytes_v2 = bytes(test_str, 'utf-8')
print(type(test_bytes_v2))

print(test_bytes_v2)

The output of the above example is:

<class 'bytes'>
b'include_help'

Conclusion

Using the bytes() method/constructor gives more options than just encoding the Python string. However, for encoding a string the approach 1, is more pythonic than using a constructor, because it is more readable.

Exercise

Select the correct option to complete each statement about converting a string to bytes in Python.

  1. In Python, to convert a string to bytes, you can use the ___ method of the string object.
  2. The ___ method accepts an optional encoding parameter to specify how the string should be encoded into bytes.
  3. By default, if no encoding is specified, the ___ encoding is used when converting a string to bytes.

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