str

class str(object='') class str(object=b'', encoding='utf-8', errors='strict')

Return a string version of object. If object is not provided, returns the empty string. Otherwise, the behavior of str() depends on whether encoding or errors is given, as follows.

If neither encoding nor errors is given, str(object) returns object.__str__(), which is the “informal” or nicely printable string representation of object. For string objects, this is the string itself. If object does not have a __str__() method, then str() falls back to returning repr(object).

If at least one of encoding or errors is given, object should be a bytes-like object (e.g. bytes or bytearray). In this case, if object is a bytes (or bytearray) object, then str(bytes, encoding, errors) is equivalent to bytes.decode(encoding, errors). Otherwise, the bytes object underlying the buffer object is obtained before calling bytes.decode(). See Binary Sequence Types — bytes, bytearray, memoryview and Buffer Protocol for information on buffer objects.

Passing a bytes object to str() without the encoding or errors arguments falls under the first case of returning the informal string representation (see also the -b command-line option to Python). For example:

>>> str(b'Zoot!')
"b'Zoot!'"

For more information on the str class and its methods, see Text Sequence Type — str and the String Methods section below. To output formatted strings, see the Format String Syntax section. In addition, see the Text Processing Services section.