What does the \'b\' character do in front of a string literal in Python?

A string is a collection of characters that can represent a single word or a complete phrase. Since you can directly assign strings in Python to a literal (unlike other technologies) it is easy to use them. The string literals are typically enclosed in quotes (' ' or " ") and they represent a sequences of characters.

However, in some scenarios we will encounter a string that starts with a lowercase b for example, b'WELCOME', Where the b prefix stands for bytes literal.

Bytes literals are useful when dealing with binary data, where data is transmitted or received in byte format rather than as human-readable text. In this article , we'll explore what the b character do in front of a string literal.

Bytes Literal

The string prefixed with b is not a regular string, it is a bytes object. Unlike the regular strings, which represent the Unicode text, the bytes object is the sequence of raw byte values ranging from 0 to 255.

The byte literals are immutable and are efficient for handling the low-level binary data.

Example 1

Let's look at the following example, where we are going to create the byte literal.

demo = b'TutorialsPoint'
print(demo)
print(type(demo))

Output

Output of the above program is as follows -

b'TutorialsPoint'
<class 'bytes'>

Example 2

Consider the following example, where we are going to compare the strings and bytes.

demo1 = b'Welcome'
demo2 = 'Welcome'
print(demo1 == demo2)

Output

Output of the above program is as follows -

False

Example 3

In the following example, we are going to decode the byte into the string.

demo = b'Vanakam'
Result = demo.decode('utf-8')
print(Result)
print(type(Result))

Output

Following is the output of the above program -

Vanakam
<class 'str'>