In Python, the ‘b’ character in front of a string literal denotes a byte string. This means the string will be treated as a sequence of bytes rather than characters. Byte strings are used when dealing with raw binary data or when encoding/decoding operations are needed.
For example:
byte_string = b’Hello’
print(byte_string) # Output: b’Hello’
In this case, b’Hello’ is a byte string, and it behaves differently from the regular string ‘Hello’. Byte strings are often used for working with files, network communication, or low-level data processing.