UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf-8’ codec can’t decode byte 0x89 in position 1: invalid start byte

Encoding and decoding in Python

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Encoding and decoding values can get confusing.

This sample code might help you out. I named the variables to show whether they were encoded (bytes) or decoded (a string) or base64 encoded or decoded.

import base64
value="Decoded string value"
value_encode = value.encode('utf-8')
value_base64encode = base64.b64encode(value_encode)
value_decode = value_base64encode.decode('utf-8')
print(value_decode)
value_encode = value_decode.encode('utf-8')
value_base64decode = base64.b64decode(value_encode)
value_decode = value_base64decode.decode('utf-8')
print(value_decode)

Sometimes you encode values so they don’t accidentally get processed incorrectly. For example if you have code in a value and you don’t want it to mess up parsing and processing, you might encode it to prevent…