Python String encode()

title = 'Python Programming'

# change encoding to utf-8
print(title.encode())

# Output: b'Python Programming'

Syntax of String encode()

The syntax of encode() method is:

string.encode(encoding='UTF-8',errors='strict')

String encode() Parameters

By default, the encode() method doesn't require any parameters.

It returns an utf-8 encoded version of the string. In case of failure, it raises a UnicodeDecodeError exception.

However, it takes two parameters:

• encoding - the encoding type a string has to be encoded to
• errors - response when encoding fails. There are six types of error response
  • strict - default response which raises a UnicodeDecodeError exception on failure
  • ignore - ignores the unencodable unicode from the result
  • replace - replaces the unencodable unicode to a question mark ?
  • xmlcharrefreplace - inserts XML character reference instead of unencodable unicode
  • backslashreplace - inserts a \uNNNN escape sequence instead of unencodable unicode
  • namereplace - inserts a \N{...} escape sequence instead of unencodable unicode

Example 1: Encode to Default Utf-8 Encoding

# unicode string
string = 'pythön!'

# print string
print('The string is:', string)

# default encoding to utf-8
string_utf = string.encode()

# print result
print('The encoded version is:', string_utf)

Output

The string is: pythön!
The encoded version is: b'pyth\xc3\xb6n!'

Example 2: Encoding with error parameter

# unicode string
string = 'pythön!'

# print string
print('The string is:', string)

# ignore error
print('The encoded version (with ignore) is:', string.encode("ascii", "ignore"))

# replace error
print('The encoded version (with replace) is:', string.encode("ascii", "replace"))

Output

The string is: pythön!
The encoded version (with ignore) is: b'pythn!'
The encoded version (with replace) is: b'pyth?n!'

Note: Try different encoding and error parameters as well.

String Encoding

Since Python 3.0, strings are stored as Unicode, i.e. each character in the string is represented by a code point. So, each string is just a sequence of Unicode code points.

For efficient storage of these strings, the sequence of code points is converted into a set of bytes. The process is known as encoding.

There are various encodings present which treat a string differently. The popular encodings being utf-8, ascii, etc.

Using the string encode() method, you can convert unicode strings into any encodings supported by Python. By default, Python uses utf-8 encoding.