String prefix question

[Alan Harris-Reid]

Gerard Flanagan wrote:
> <div class="moz-text-flowed">Alan Harris-Reid wrote:
>> In the Python.org 3.1 documentation (section 20.4.6), there is a 
>> simple “Hello World” WSGI application which includes the following 
>> method...
>>
>> def hello_world_app(environ, start_response):
>> status ='200 OK' # HTTP Status
>> headers =(b'Content-type', b'text/plain; charset=utf-8')] # HTTP Headers
>> start_response(status, headers)
>>
>> # The returned object is going to be printed
>> return [b"Hello World"]
>>
>> Question - Can anyone tell me why the 'b' prefix is present before 
>> each string? The method seems to work equally well with and without 
>> the prefix. From what I can gather from the documentation the b 
>> prefix represents a bytes literal, but can anyone explain (in simple 
>> english) what this means?
>>
>> Many thanks,
>> Alan
>
> Another link:
>
> http://www.stereoplex.com/two-voices/python-unicode-and-unicodedecodeerror 
>
>
>
>
> </div>
>
Gerard - thanks for the link - explains it well.

Many thanks,
Alan