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This is a Python 101 type question, but it had me baffled for a while when I tried to use a package that seemed to convert my string input into bytes. As you will see below I found the answer for myself, but I felt it was worth recording here because of the time it took me to unearth what was going on. It seems to be generic to Python 3, so I have not referred to the original package I was playing with; it does not seem to be an error (just that the particular package had a .tostring() method that was clearly not producing what I understood as a string...) My test program goes like this: import mangler # spoof package stringThing = """ <Doc> <Greeting>Hello World</Greeting> <Greeting>你好</Greeting> </Doc> """ # print out the input print('This is the string input:') print(stringThing) # now make the string into bytes bytesThing = mangler.tostring(stringThing) # pseudo-code again # now print it out print('\nThis is the bytes output:') print(bytesThing) The output from this code gives this: This is the string input: <Doc> <Greeting>Hello World</Greeting> <Greeting>你好</Greeting> </Doc> This is the bytes output: b'\n<Doc>\n <Greeting>Hello World</Greeting>\n <Greeting>\xe4\xbd\xa0\xe5\xa5\xbd</Greeting>\n</Doc>\n' So, there is a need to be able to convert between bytes and strings, to avoid ending up with non-ascii characters being turned into gobbledegook.

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