Read byte string from file in python3

The file content is similar to the following and the file encoding is utf-8:

cd232704-a46f-3d9d-97f6-67edb897d65f    b'this Friday, Gerda Scheuers will be excited \xe2\x80\x94 but she\xe2\x80\x99s most excited about the merchandise the movie will bring.'

      

Here is my code:

with open(file, 'r') as f_in:
    for line in f_in:
        tokens = line.split('\t')
        print(tokens[1])

      

I want to get the right answer - "Gerda Scheyers will be excited this Friday, but she was most worried about what the film will bring."

print(b'\xe2\x80\x94'.decode('utf-8')) #convert into ASCII 

      

But I cannot read the bytes from the file. If I open a file with bytes, I need to decode the string to split it.

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1 answer


You can use ast.literal_eval

to convert byte literals to bytes:

Then, we decode it to get a string object:

>>> ast.literal_eval(r"b'excited \xe2\x80\x94 but she\xe2\x80\x99s'")
b'excited \xe2\x80\x94 but she\xe2\x80\x99s'
>>> ast.literal_eval(r"b'excited \xe2\x80\x94 but she\xe2\x80\x99s'").decode('utf-8')
'excited — but she’s'

      




with open(file, 'r') as f_in:
    for line in f_in:
        tokens = line.split('\t')
        # if len(tokens) < 2:
        #    continue
        bytes_part = ast.literal_eval(tokens[1])
        s = bytes_part.decode('utf-8')  # Decode the bytes to convert to a string

      

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