Strings in memory

All text strings are uniformed in memory, without specific character encodings. For example, a str may be represented using 1, 2 or 4 bytes for each character, which varies according to the upperlimit of bytes need for each character. When saving to files or transferring throught networks, strings will be encoded to specific charset to be transferred.

str vs. bytes

str object stores text characters. bytes object store binary data. For open(…) function (to open a file), the way specified (b or no b) determines which type of object will be returned.

String Literals

b is used to prefix a binary data, such as b’good’ (a bytes object). If no prefix, then default to str object.