title: How to convert a byte array to string?
body: <p>I just finished creating a huffman compression algorithm . I converted my compressed text from a string to a byte array with bytearray(). Im attempting to decompress my huffman algorithm. My only concern though is that i cannot convert my byte array back into a string. Is there any built in function i could use to convert my byte array (with a variable) back into a string? If not is there a better method to convert my compressed string to something else? I attempted to use byte_array.decode() and I get this: </p>
  
  <pre><code>print("Index: ", Index) # The Index
  
  
  # Subsituting text to our compressed index
  
  for x in range(len(TextTest)):
  
      TextTest[x]=Index[TextTest[x]]
  
  
  NewText=''.join(TextTest)
  
  # print(NewText)
  # NewText=int(NewText)
  
  
  byte_array = bytearray() # Converts the compressed string text to bytes
  for i in range(0, len(NewText), 8):
      byte_array.append(int(NewText[i:i + 8], 2))
  
  
  NewSize = ("Compressed file Size:",sys.getsizeof(byte_array),'bytes')
  
  print(byte_array)
  
  print(byte_array)
  
  print(NewSize)
  
  x=bytes(byte_array)
  x.decode()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x88 in position 0: invalid start byte</p>