How do I get rid of the b-prefix in a string in python?

Question

A bunch of the tweets I am importing are having this issue where they read

b'I posted a new photo to Facebook'

I gather the b indicates it is a byte. But this is proving problematic because in my CSV files that I end up writing, the b doesn't go away and is interferring in future code.

Is there a simple way to remove this b prefix from my lines of text?

Keep in mind, I seem to need to have the text encoded in utf-8 or tweepy has trouble pulling them from the web.

---

Here's the link content I'm analyzing:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sjmsbuhrghj7abt/new_tweets.txt?dl=0

new_tweets = 'content in the link'

Code Attempt

outtweets = [[tweet.text.encode("utf-8").decode("utf-8")] for tweet in new_tweets]
print(outtweets)

Error

UnicodeEncodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-21-6019064596bf> in <module>()
      1 for screen_name in user_list:
----> 2     get_all_tweets(screen_name,"instance file")

<ipython-input-19-e473b4771186> in get_all_tweets(screen_name, mode)
     99             with open(os.path.join(save_location,'%s.instance' % screen_name), 'w') as f:
    100                 writer = csv.writer(f)
--> 101                 writer.writerows(outtweets)
    102         else:
    103             with open(os.path.join(save_location,'%s.csv' % screen_name), 'w') as f:

C:UsersStan ShunpikeAnaconda3libencodingscp1252.py in encode(self, input, final)
     17 class IncrementalEncoder(codecs.IncrementalEncoder):
     18     def encode(self, input, final=False):
---> 19         return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_table)[0]
     20 
     21 class IncrementalDecoder(codecs.IncrementalDecoder):

UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 64-65: character maps to <undefined>

Answer 1

you need to decode the bytes of you want a string:

b = b'1234'
print(b.decode('utf-8'))  # '1234'