How to Encode UTF8 in Python

UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format. It is a variable-width encoding system that encodes all the characters covered by Unicode into a binary string of one to four bytes.

It allows the representation of international characters such as Chinese. It is also backward compatible with ASCII.

UTF-8 is mostly used to encode email and web pages.

Use encode() to Encode a String in UTF-8 in Python

In Python, if we want to encode a string in UTF-8, we will use the encode() method. It is a built-in method that returns the encoded version of a string.

By default, it does not take any arguments and converts the string to UTF-8. However, it can accept two optional parameters, encoding and errors.

The encoding refers to the encoding technique used, and the errors represent the response in case of encoding failure. The default response is strict, which raises a UnicodeDecodeError exception on failure.

In the following code, we encoded the word Naïve, which contains a special character ï. The encode() method converts the whole text into the UTF-8 version.

Example Code:

string = "Naïve"
print("String before encoding:", string)
print("String after encoding:", string.encode())

Output:

String before encoding: Naïve
String after encoding: b'Na\xc3\xafve'