Decoding of file in Python

The prefix " b' " in the representation of your object shows that the text you have at that point in your program is a bytes object, not a text string.

In Python 3 the two things are different - since they invented multi-byte text encodings, it can not be said that a byte is a character.

The normal workflow in any Python application is:

Then in your case, assuming that the object you have there is in the a variable, to continue your program, just decode those bytes to text (object of type str ) in Python 3 and continue your program:

a = b'N\xc3\xa3o n\xc3\xa3o n\xc3\xa3o, n\xc3\xb3s iremos sim!'
b = a.decode("utf-8")
print(b)

In the case, I know that the encoding is utf-8 to look at the encoding: two bytes for an accented character, and the first one being "\ xc3" is a good hint that bytes represent text encoded in utf-8 .

An essential thing to understand is the difference between text ( str in Python 3) which is composed of unicode characters, and bytes, which are sequences of numbers between 0 and 255 effectively stored in files or transmitted over the network. To do this, be sure to read:

link

A bad thing in Python is working with string , I've already had a lot of headache with unicode and utf-8 . p>

Going to the point. In interpreted languages, it is often used header comments for "configurations."

In Python , usually the first line is reserved for the executable.

#!/usr/bin/python

or

#!/usr/bin/env python

And the second line usually saves coding information:

#*-* coding: utf-8 *-*
#*-* coding: latin-1 *-*

Use only one of them!

The *-* snippets should not be needed, but I've never used them without them, so I can not tell if it will make a difference.

With this line, you can use special characters in your code.

print "maçã é maçã!"

If you want to use unicode , you can use the unicode method to convert your bytes.

uni_str = unicode("maçã", "utf-8")

But you should have the coding line in all files anyway!