Convert bytes to a string

 You need to decode the bytes object to produce a string:

>>> b"abcde"
b'abcde'

# utf-8 is used here because it is a very common encoding, but you
# need to use the encoding your data is actually in.
>>> b"abcde".decode("utf-8") 
'abcde'

You need to decode the byte string and turn it in to a character (Unicode) string.

On Python 2

encoding = 'utf-8'
'hello'.decode(encoding)

or

unicode('hello', encoding)

On Python 3

encoding = 'utf-8'
b'hello'.decode(encoding)

or

str(b'hello', encoding)