String prefix question

[Ben Finney]

Alan Harris-Reid <alan at baselinedata.co.uk> writes:

> From what I can gather from the documentation the b prefix represents
> a bytes literal

Yes. In Python 3 there are two types with similar-looking literal
syntax: ‘str’ and ‘bytes’. The types are mutually incompatible (though
they can be explicitly converted).

    <URL:http://docs.python.org/3.1/library/stdtypes.html#typesseq>
    <URL:http://docs.python.org/3.1/reference/lexical_analysis.html#strings>

> but can anyone explain (in simple english) what this means?

It means the difference between “a sequence of bytes” and “a sequence of
characters”. The two are not the same, have not ever been the same
despite a long history in computing of handwaving the differences, and
Python 3 finally makes them unambiguously distinct.

A general solution wasn't even feasible for a long time, but now we have
Unicode, a mature standard for uniformly representing all the world's
writing systems in software. So Python 3 made ‘str’ the Unicode “string
of characters” type, and the ‘'foo'’ literal syntax creates objects of
this type.

The Python 3.1 documentation has a Unicode HOWTO that you should read
<URL:http://docs.python.org/3.1/howto/unicode.html>.

-- 
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Ben Finney