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The encode() method returns an encoded version of the given string .

Syntax of String encode()

The syntax of encode() method is:

String encode() Parameters

By default, the encode() method doesn't require any parameters.

It returns an utf-8 encoded version of the string. In case of failure, it raises a UnicodeDecodeError exception .

However, it takes two parameters:

  • encoding - the encoding type a string has to be encoded to
  • strict - default response which raises a UnicodeDecodeError exception on failure
  • ignore - ignores the unencodable unicode from the result
  • replace - replaces the unencodable unicode to a question mark ?
  • xmlcharrefreplace - inserts XML character reference instead of unencodable unicode
  • backslashreplace - inserts a \uNNNN escape sequence instead of unencodable unicode
  • namereplace - inserts a \N{...} escape sequence instead of unencodable unicode

Example 1: Encode to Default Utf-8 Encoding

Example 2: encoding with error parameter.

Note: Try different encoding and error parameters as well.

String Encoding

Since Python 3.0, strings are stored as Unicode, i.e. each character in the string is represented by a code point. So, each string is just a sequence of Unicode code points.

For efficient storage of these strings, the sequence of code points is converted into a set of bytes. The process is known as encoding .

There are various encodings present which treat a string differently. The popular encodings being utf-8 , ascii , etc.

Using the string encode() method, you can convert unicode strings into any encodings supported by Python . By default, Python uses utf-8 encoding.

Sorry about that.

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❮ String Methods

UTF-8 encode the string:

Definition and Usage

The encode() method encodes the string, using the specified encoding. If no encoding is specified, UTF-8 will be used.

Parameter Values

Parameter Description
Optional. A String specifying the encoding to use. Default is UTF-8
Optional. A String specifying the error method. Legal values are:
- uses a backslash instead of the character that could not be encoded
- ignores the characters that cannot be encoded
- replaces the character with a text explaining the character
- Default, raises an error on failure
- replaces the character with a questionmark
- replaces the character with an xml character

More Examples

These examples uses ascii encoding, and a character that cannot be encoded, showing the result with different errors:

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Encoding and Decoding Strings (in Python 3.x)

In our other article, Encoding and Decoding Strings (in Python 2.x) , we looked at how Python 2.x works with string encoding. Here we will look at encoding and decoding strings in Python 3.x, and how it is different.

Encoding/Decoding Strings in Python 3.x vs Python 2.x

Many things in Python 2.x did not change very drastically when the language branched off into the most current Python 3.x versions. The Python string is not one of those things, and in fact it is probably what changed most drastically. The changes it underwent are most evident in how strings are handled in encoding/decoding in Python 3.x as opposed to Python 2.x. Encoding and decoding strings in Python 2.x was somewhat of a chore, as you might have read in another article. Thankfully, turning 8-bit strings into unicode strings and vice-versa, and all the methods in between the two is forgotten in Python 3.x. Let's examine what this means by going straight to some examples.

We'll start with an example string containing a non-ASCII character (i.e., “ü” or “umlaut-u”):

[python] s = 'Flügel' [/python]

Now if we reference and print the string, it gives us essentially the same result:

[python] >>> s 'Flügel' >>> print(s) Flügel [/python]

In contrast to the same string s in Python 2.x, in this case s is already a Unicode string, and all strings in Python 3.x are automatically Unicode. The visible difference is that s wasn't changed after we instantiated it.

Although our string value contains a non-ASCII character, it isn't very far off from the ASCII character set, aka the Basic Latin set (in fact it's part of the supplemental set to Basic Latin). What would happen if we have a character not only a non-ASCII character but a non-Latin character? Let's try it:

[python] >>> nonlat = '字' >>> nonlat '字' >>> print(nonlat) 字 [/python]

As we can see, it doesn't matter whether it's a string containing all Latin characters or otherwise, because strings in Python 3.x will all behave this way (and unlike in Python 2.x you can type any character into the IDLE window!).

If you have dealt with encoding and Decoding Strings in Python 2.x, you know that they can be a lot more troublesome to deal with, and that Python 3.x makes it much less painful. However, if we don't need to use the unicode , encode , or decode methods or include multiple backslash escapes into our string variables to use them immediately, then what need do we have to encode or decode our Python 3.x strings? Before answering that question, we'll first look at b'...' (bytes) objects in Python 3.x in contrast to the same in Python 2.x.

The Python 3.x Bytes Object

In Python 2.x, prefixing a string literal with a "b" (or "B") is legal syntax, but it does nothing special:

[python] >>> b'prefix in Python 2.x' 'prefix in Python 2.x' [/python]

In Python 3.x, however, this prefix indicates the string is a bytes object which differs from the normal string (which as we know is by default a Unicode string), and even the 'b' prefix is preserved:

[python] >>> b'prefix in Python 3.x' b'prefix in Python 3.x' [/python]

The thing about bytes objects is that they actually are arrays of integers , though we see them as ASCII characters. How or why they are arrays of integers is not of great importance to us at this point, but what is important is that we will only see them as a string of ASCII literal characters and they can only contain ASCII literal characters. Which is why the following won't work (or with any non-ASCII characters):

[python] >>> b'字' SyntaxError: bytes can only contain ASCII literal characters. [/python]

Now to see how bytes objects relate to strings, let's first look at how to turn a string into a bytes object and vice versa.

Converting Python Strings to Bytes, and Bytes to Strings

If we want to turn our nonlat string from before into a bytes object, we can use the bytes constructor method; however, if we only use the string as the sole argument we'll get this error:

[python] >>> bytes(nonlat) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> TypeError: string argument without an encoding [/python]

As we can see, we need to include an encoding with the string. Let's use a common one, the UTF-8 encoding:

[python] >>> bytes(nonlat, 'utf-8') b'\xe5\xad\x97' [/python]

Now we have our bytes object, encoded in UTF-8 ... but what exactly does that mean? It means that the single character contained in our nonlat variable was effectively translated into a string of code that means "字" in UTF-8—in other words, it was encoded . Does this mean if we use an encode method call on nonlat , that we'll get the same result? Let's see:

[python] >>> nonlat.encode() b'\xe5\xad\x97' [/python]

Indeed we got the same result, but we did not have to give the encoding in this case because the encode method in Python 3.x uses the UTF-8 encoding by default. If we changed it to UTF-16, we'd have a different result:

[python] >>> nonlat.encode('utf-16') b'\xff\xfeW[' [/python]

Though both calls perform the same function, they do it in slightly different ways depending on the encoding or codec.

Since we can encode strings to make bytes, we can also decode bytes to make strings—but when decoding a bytes object, we must know the correct codec to use to get the correct result. For example, if we try to use UTF-8 to decode a UTF-16-encoded version of nonlat above:

[python] # We can use the method directly on the bytes >>> b'\xff\xfeW['.decode('utf-8') Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte [/python]

And we get an error! Now if we use the correct codec it turns out fine:

[python] >>> b'\xff\xfeW['.decode('utf-16') '字' [/python]

In this case we were alerted by Python because of the failed decoding operation, but the caveat is that errors will not always occur when the codec is incorrect! This is because codecs often use the same code phrases (the "\xXXX" escapes that compose the bytes objects) but to represent different things! If we think of this in the context of human languages, using different codecs to encode and decode the same information would be like trying to translate a word or words from Spanish into English with an Italian-English dictionary—some of the phonemes in Italian and Spanish might be similar, but you'll still be left with the wrong translation!

Writing non-ASCII Data to Files in Python 3.x

As a final note on strings in Python 3.x and Python 2.x, we must be sure to remember that using the open method for writing to files in both branches will not allow for Unicode strings (that contain non-ASCII characters) to be written to files. In order to do this the strings must be encoded .

This is no big deal in Python 2.x, as a string will only be Unicode if you make it so (by using the unicode method or str.decode ), but in Python 3.x all strings are Unicode by default, so if we want to write such a string, e.g. nonlat , to file, we'd need to use str.encode and the wb (binary) mode for open to write the string to a file without causing an error, like so:

[python] >>> with open('nonlat.txt', 'wb') as f: f.write(nonlat.encode()) [/python]

Also when reading from a file with non-ASCII data, it's important to use the rb mode and decode the data with the correct codec — unless of course, you don't mind having an "Italian" translation for your "Spanish."

About The Author

Les De Shay

Les De Shay

  • Python Tips and Tricks
  • Encoding and Decoding Python Strings Series

Related Articles

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Python Strings encode() method

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Python String encode() converts a string value into a collection of bytes, using an encoding scheme specified by the user.

Python String encode() Method Syntax:

Syntax: encode(encoding, errors) Parameters:   encoding: Specifies the encoding on the basis of which encoding has to be performed.  errors: Decides how to handle the errors if they occur, e.g ‘strict’ raises Unicode error in case of exception and ‘ignore’ ignores the errors that occurred. There are six types of error response strict – default response which raises a UnicodeDecodeError exception on failure ignore – ignores the unencodable unicode from the result replace – replaces the unencodable unicode to a question mark ? xmlcharrefreplace – inserts XML character reference instead of unencodable unicode backslashreplace – inserts a \uNNNN escape sequence instead of unencodable unicode namereplace – inserts a \N{…} escape sequence instead of unencodable unicode Return:  Returns the string in the encoded form

Python String encode() Method Example:

Example 1: Code to print encoding schemes available

There are certain encoding schemes supported by Python String encode() method. We can get the supported encodings using the Python code below.

Output:  

Example 2: Code to encode the string

 

Errors when using wrong encoding scheme

Example 1: python string encode() method will raise unicodeencodeerror if wrong encoding scheme is used, example 2: using ‘errors’ parameter to ignore errors while encoding.

Python String encode() method with errors parameter set to ‘ignore’ will ignore the errors in conversion of characters into specified encoding scheme.

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Specifying the Character Encoding

Bartosz Zaczyński

  • Discussion (2)

00:00 In this lesson, you’ll learn how to specify the character encoding of a text file in Python so that you can correctly read the file contents.

00:10 Decoding row bytes into characters and the other way around requires that you choose and agree on some encoding scheme, which is usually known as character encoding.

00:20 You can experiment with this concept by running a few lines of code in IDLE. Start by declaring a string of characters like "cash" , which is the word that you saw in the previous lesson.

00:31 You can then encode this string into the corresponding bytes. What comes back is a bytes() object literal, which looks quite like a regular string, except that it starts with a lowercase letter "b" . However, it’s actually a concealed sequence of numeric bytes that you can reveal by turning them into a list, for example.

00:54 If you look closely, these are exactly the same numeric ASCII codes that you saw earlier. Note that you can reverse the process by creating a new instance of the bytes() object, passing the list of integers, and calling .decode() on it.

01:11 Don’t worry about the technical details, though. This is only to illustrate the idea behind encoding characters into bytes and decoding them back into characters.

01:20 Python does this automatically for you whenever you open a file in text mode, so this happens seamlessly in the background. Unfortunately, things can get more complicated when you stumble on some funky characters that aren’t defined in the original ASCII encoding table.

01:37 These could be letters with diacritic marks or symbols from non-Latin alphabets. ASCII was designed for the English language, after all. Let’s say you wanted to decode the following sequence of bytes.

01:50 I’m going to change the last two and append one more.

02:01 This produces the word "café" with an accent. Notice that although the word only has four characters, it was encoded using five bytes, and that’s because of the last character, which doesn’t have a corresponding ASCII code.

02:15 How was it then possible for Python to decode it, you may ask? Well, when you don’t request any particular character encoding yourself, then Python silently falls back to your operating systems’s default character encoding. In my case, that default encoding happens to be UTF-8, which is a superset of ASCII, so it’s fully backward compatible, but at the same time, it extends ASCII with a much wider range of characters.

02:44 Note that this doesn’t mean it’ll be the same for you. Your operating system may be using a completely different character encoding. This is a problem because if you test your code on, say, macOS and it works, then it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work elsewhere.

03:01 It’s one of the reasons why you should always specify what character encoding to use. When in doubt, just request UTF-8, which has become the widespread standard across the world.

03:13 You can do this by passing a string with the encoding’s name to the relevant method. When you try something else, like ASCII, then you’re going to have a problem because one of the bytes doesn’t correspond to any known ASCII code. Similarly, when you specify a character encoding that can’t represent one of the letters from your text, Python won’t be able to encode a string into bytes.

03:39 These problems will also affect your text files, so to address them both, the built-in open() function as well as its Path.open() counterpart expose the .encoding attribute.

03:51 When you open a file in text mode, which is the default mode, you must tell Python which character encoding the file was written with.

04:08 That’s because different character encodings will represent the same text differently. If you provide an incorrect encoding like here, then you’ll most likely end up with a familiar error

04:20 or, in the best-case scenario, some nonsensical output.

04:29 In general, you have to know the encoding of a text file that you’re about to open for reading. If you’re unsure, then there are libraries like chardet that can help you with that by trying to guess the encoding. However, there’s no guarantee they’ll succeed at all.

04:46 If you’d like to get a complete list of character encodings that your Python version supports, then import the aliases dictionary from encodings.aliases

04:59 and get all of its values.

05:04 These are the encoding names that you can use when you open a file in Python.

05:12 In early computing, people adopted dozens of character encodings to encompass the unique needs of different spoken languages. Because of the limited disk space at the time, each encoding assigned different characters to the same byte value, making those encodings mostly incompatible with each other. For example, the byte value 225 could represent any of the letters depicted in the first row of the table on the slide, and even more. Apart from that, once you had chosen a given character encoding for your text, you could only represent characters belonging to a few similar alphabets.

05:50 So if you wanted to write a piece of text that included Arabic, Greek, and Korean all at the same time, then you’d be out of luck. It just wasn’t possible to fit all these different characters on a single encoding.

06:06 Fortunately, this problem is a thing of the past thanks to the advent of Unicode, which is a single standardized and universal numeric representation of all characters from any spoken language. It even specifies emoji symbols!

06:22 In Unicode, each character is given a unique number called a code point that can’t be confused with any other character. However, because the standard defines almost one hundred fifty thousand characters, there’s no single font that could possibly display them all.

06:40 There’s a whole family of specific Unicode-to-byte encodings that may use a different number of bytes per character, depending on your primary language.

06:49 For example, if your text is mostly English with occasional foreign-language asides or citations, then you may want to allocate fewer bytes for Latin letters because they appear most frequently. In this case, you can use UTF-8, which is backward compatible with ASCII by using only eight bits, or a single byte, per character. That being said, UTF-8 may sometimes require as many as four bytes to encode an exotic character like an emoji symbol, so it’s a form of variable length encoding. Conversely, other popular Unicode encodings always use multiple bytes, which may be preferable when your texts predominantly consist of non-English characters. These days, UTF-8 is arguably the most widely used character encoding on the planet.

07:42 Software programs, including Python, adopt it as standard. This encoding remains backward compatible with ASCII because the first 128 characters have essentially identical byte values.

07:56 At the same time, it supports multiple languages, uses the previously mentioned compact representation, and was designed to be Internet-friendly. All in all, UTF-8 should become the default choice for your applications because you can’t go wrong with it. Even if you don’t think you’ll ever need to use characters other than English letters, embracing Unicode early on is still a good idea because you may eventually want to offer your content in other languages, or the content may be user generated, in which case you’ll need to support a wide range of characters anyway.

08:32 As a rule of thumb, always explicitly specify the character encoding of a text file that you open in Python, and make sure that it actually matches the encoding that the file was written with. If you’re creating a new file yourself, then stick with UTF-8, which is the most suitable encoding in most cases.

08:52 Not specifying any character encoding when you open a text file is a common mistake, which some tools and sometimes even Python itself will warn you about.

09:02 One of the most extreme but also very real examples of this problem can actually prevent you from installing a Python library. This is because many build tools will try to open the README file of a package as part of the installation procedure.

09:17 If they fail to decode the characters in that file because of the wrong character encoding, then you’ll only be able to install the library on some operating systems, but not others.

09:30 Character encoding is not the only thing you should keep in mind when you open a file in Python. Another thing that you may sometimes need to consider when working with text files in Python is the line-ending character, which you’ll learn about in the next lesson.

Avatar image for dakshnavenki

dakshnavenki on Aug. 16, 2023

I tried the encode and decode function in python 2.7.5 IDLE window, but the output is same characters and not the ASCII values as mentioned here, is the python 2.7.5 doesnt support encode and decode functions or is there difference between python version 2 and 3 for these functions?

Avatar image for Bartosz Zaczyński

Bartosz Zaczyński RP Team on Aug. 16, 2023

@dakshnavenki There are significant differences between Python 2 and 3 regarding string representation. In Python 2, there was no separate data type for representing sequences of bytes, while the string type ( str ) served this purpose instead. So, when you .encode() a Python 2 string using the specified encoding, you end up with another string:

In this case, the source string consists of ASCII letters only, so the resulting string that you see in the output is the same as the original string that you started with. On the other hand, when you try encoding a Unicode string with some exotic characters, then you’ll see a difference:

Regardless of the string’s contents, to reveal the numeric byte values of its individual characters in Python 2, you can call ord() on them:

Last but not least, I should mention that Python 2 has been long deprecated and is no longer maintained, nor does it receive security and bug fixes. Unless you have specific reasons to use an older version of the language, you should use Python 3 instead.

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string encoding in python assignment expert

Python String encode()

Returns a byte object that is an encoded version of the string.

Minimal Example

As you read over the explanations below, feel free to watch our video guide about this particular string method:

Python String Methods [Ultimate Guide]

Syntax and Explanation

str.encode(encoding="utf-8", errors="strict")

Returns a bytes object that is an encoded version of the string.

  • The default encoding is 'utf-8' .
  • The optional argument errors sets the so-called error handling scheme —a string value.

Error Handling Scheme

The default error handling scheme is 'strict' and it raises a UnicodeError .

Possible error handling schemes are 'ignore' , 'replace' , 'xmlcharrefreplace' , 'backslashreplace' . A full list of possible encodings is available here: Standard Encodings .

You can customize error handling schemes by registering a name via codecs.register_error() as shown in the docs under section Error Handlers .

Changelog String encode()

  • Changed in version 3.1 : You can now add keyword arguments.
  • Changed in version 3.9 : Checks the error handling scheme errors in development and debug modes .

More String Methods

Python’s string class comes with a number of useful additional string methods . Here’s a short collection of all Python string methods—each link opens a short tutorial in a new tab.

MethodDescription
Return a copy of the string with capitalized first character and lowercased remaining characters.
Return a lowercased, casefolded string similar to but more aggressive.
Return a centered string of a certain length, padded with whitespace or custom characters.
Return the number of non-overlapping occurrences of a substring.
Returns a byte object that is an encoded version of the string.
Returns whether the string ends with a given value or not ( or ).
Return a string with spaces instead of tab characters.
Returns the index of the first occurrence of the specified substring.
Formats the string according to the .
Formats the string according to the , passing a mapping object.
Returns the index of the first occurrence of the specified substring, like but it raises a if the substring is not found.
Checks whether all characters are alphabetic or numeric ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are alphabetic ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are ASCII ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are decimal numbers ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are digits, i.e., numbers from 0 to 9 ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are identifiers that can be used as names of functions, classes, or variables ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are lowercase ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are numeric values ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are printable ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are whitespaces ( or ).
Checks if the string is title-cased ( or ).
Checks whether all characters are uppercase ( or ).
Concatenates the elements in an iterable.
Returns a left-justified string filling up the right-hand side with fill characters.
Returns a lowercase string version.
Trims whitespaces on the left and returns a new string.
Returns a translation table.
Searches for a separator substring and returns a tuple with three strings: (1) everything before the separator, (2) the separator itself, and (3) everything after it.
Return if the string starts with , and otherwise.
Return ] if the string starts with , and otherwise.
Returns a string with replaced values.
Return the highest index in the string where a substring is found. Returns if not found.
Return the highest index in the string where a substring is found. Returns if not found.
Returns a right-justified string filling up the left-hand side with fill characters.
Searches for a separator substring and returns a tuple with three strings: (1) everything before the separator, (2) the separator itself, and (3) everything after it.
Splits the string at a given separator and returns a split list of substrings.
Trims whitespaces on the right and returns a new string.
Splits the string at a given separator and returns a split list of substrings.
Splits the string at line breaks such as and returns a split list of substrings (i.e., ).
Returns whether the string starts with a given value or not ( or ).
Trims whitespaces on the left and right and returns a new string.
Swaps lowercase to uppercase characters and vice versa.
Returns a new string with uppercase first characters of each word.
Returns a translated string.
Returns a lowercase string version.
Fills the string from the left with characters.

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Python method encodes the string according to the provided encoding standard. By default Python strings are in unicode form but can be encoded to other standards also.

Encoding is a process of converting text from one standard code to another.

: encoding standard, default is UTF-8> : errors mode to ignore or replace the error messages.

Both are optional. Default encoding is UTF-8.

Error parameter has a default value strict and allows other possible values 'ignore', 'replace', 'xmlcharrefreplace', 'backslashreplace' etc too.

It returns an encoded string.

Let's see some examples to understand the encode() method.

A simple method which encode unicode string to utf-8 encoding standard.

We are encoding a latin character

We are encoding latin character into ascii, it throws an error. See the example below

If we want to ignore errors, pass ignore as the second parameter.

It ignores error and replace character with ? mark.






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How to Encode a String into a Valid Python Variable Name and Decode It Back Efficiently?

I need to encode arbitrary strings into valid Python variable names and be able to decode them back to the original strings. The strings may contain any characters, including those that are not valid in Python variable names.

Here are the requirements:

Valid Python Variable Name: The encoded string must be a valid Python variable name, which means it can only contain letters, digits, and underscores, and must start with a letter or an underscore. Reversible: The encoding should be reversible, allowing me to decode the variable name back to the original string. Efficiency: The encoding and decoding process should be efficient enough for use in a server application. I’ve tried using base64 encoding but ran into issues with characters like - and _. I also considered using werkzeug.security to hash the string, but it’s too slow for my needs in a server application. Here’s the solution I’ve come up with so far:

Considerations: Werkzeug Security: I considered using werkzeug.security for hashing the string to ensure a valid variable name, but it proved to be too slow for my server application. Questions: Is this approach reliable for all possible input strings? Are there any edge cases I might have missed that could cause the encoded variable name to be invalid? Is there a more efficient method to achieve the same goal? Any suggestions or improvements would be greatly appreciated!

user23470475's user avatar

  • Please visit the help center to remind yourself how to ask good questions here. For starters, a question should contain ONE question, not many. Also note: this site isn't a "here are my requirements, here is my code, is that good" service. In other words: your question boils down to "can someone help with my assignment", and that isn't a legit question around here. –  GhostCat Commented May 17 at 14:10
  • 4 Why are you messing around with encoding, or variable names at all? ANY string works just fine as-is, as a key in a dictionary. –  jasonharper Commented May 17 at 14:16
  • @jasonharper I want to store the users data and I noticed that storing data in separated variables is less memory consuming and faster than dictionaries. And besides of that, There is a reason that I can't use dictionaries. –  user23470475 Commented May 17 at 16:45

2 Answers 2

I think your base64 idea is definitely going to work! Consider the character set use for base64:

And the rules for python variables:

And you basically have your answer:

You can use the under char _ to further encode the base64 results into a valid python variable.

Here's what I'm suggesting:

  • base64 encode the data
  • prepend the result with a _ (this fulfills P1, P2 and P5).
  • Convert any +, /, or = characters to "underscore encoded". + --> _P and / --> _S and = --> _E. This fulfills P3.
  • Regarding P5, none of the python keywords start with a _ so suggestion 2 above meets this criteria.

Of course, to get the data back, just remove the underscore prefix and then un-underderscore encode.

Mark's user avatar

I can use non-64base characters to separate them.

Thanks to everyone!

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string encoding in python assignment expert

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