NumPy encode() function

In this tutorial, we will cover the encode() function of the char module of Numpy library.

The encode() function is used to encode the input string. The set of available codecs are taken from the Python standard library.

This function calls the str.encode in an element-wise manner.

The default encoding scheme used is utf_8.

Syntax of encode():

The syntax required to use this function is as follows:

numpy.char.encode(a, encoding=None, errors=None)

The above syntax indicates that encode() is a function of the char module and takes three paameters.

Parameters:

Let us discuss the parameters of this function:

• a
  This parameter indicates an array of strings

• encoding
  This is an optional parameter that denotes the name of the encoding to be used.

• errors
  This parameter is used to specify how to handle encoding errors.

Returned Values:

The encode() function will always return an encoded string.

Example 1:

The code snippet is as follows where we will use encode() function with some different encoding, say cp037:

import numpy as np

a = ['aAaAaA', '  aA  ', 'abBABba','dffgs','ttsred']
print("Input is:")
print(a)

x = np.char.encode(a, encoding='cp037', errors=None)
print("Encoded String is:")
print(x)

Input is:
['aAaAaA', ' aA ', 'abBABba', 'dffgs', 'ttsred']
Encoded String is:
[b'\x81\xc1\x81\xc1\x81\xc1' b'@@\x81\xc1@@'
b'\x81\x82\xc2\xc1\xc2\x82\x81' b'\x84\x86\x86\x87\xa2'
b'\xa3\xa3\xa2\x99\x85\x84']

Example 2:

In the example given below, we will use encoding scheme utf-8 and will check the output:

import numpy as np

a = ['aAaAaA', '  aA  ', 'abBABba','dffgs','ttsred']
print("Input is:")
print(a)

x = np.char.encode(a, encoding='utf-8', errors=None)
print("Encoded String is:")
print(x)

Input is:
['aAaAaA', ' aA ', 'abBABba', 'dffgs', 'ttsred']
Encoded String is:
[b'aAaAaA' b' aA ' b'abBABba' b'dffgs' b'ttsred']

Summary

In this tutorial we learned about encode() function of the Numpy library. We covered how it is used with its syntax and values returned by this function.