How to convert a byte array to string?

Question

I just finished creating a huffman compression algorithm . I converted my compressed text from a string to a byte array with bytearray(). Im attempting to decompress my huffman algorithm. My only concern though is that i cannot convert my byte array back into a string. Is there any built in function i could use to convert my byte array (with a variable) back into a string? If not is there a better method to convert my compressed string to something else? I attempted to use byte_array.decode() and I get this:

print("Index: ", Index) # The Index


# Subsituting text to our compressed index

for x in range(len(TextTest)):

    TextTest[x]=Index[TextTest[x]]


NewText=''.join(TextTest)

# print(NewText)
# NewText=int(NewText)


byte_array = bytearray() # Converts the compressed string text to bytes
for i in range(0, len(NewText), 8):
    byte_array.append(int(NewText[i:i + 8], 2))


NewSize = ("Compressed file Size:",sys.getsizeof(byte_array),'bytes')

print(byte_array)

print(byte_array)

print(NewSize)

x=bytes(byte_array)
x.decode()

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x88 in position 0: invalid start byte

Answer 1

You can use .decode('ascii') (leave empty for utf-8).

print(bytearray("abcd", 'utf-8').decode())
>>> abcd

Source : Convert bytes to a string?