Why the readchar() return a byte, when it have to be a string

Question

I have read the documentation about readchar, and there it says that the readchar method have to return a string, but when I run it returns bytes. I would like to understand why this happen, because I am new in the programming

a) This is the code I use to prove, and here say the data returned is a byte

     x = readchar.readchar()
     print(a)
     print(type(x))  

b) This is the output in my consola

    b'a'
    <class 'bytes'>

c) This is the readchar documentation https://pypi.org/project/readchar/ or https://github.com/magmax/python-readchar

d) This is what says in the doc about it

readchar() Reads the next char from stdin, returning it as a string with length 1.

PS. I made the same prove for readkey(), and this return a string according to the doc

Answer 1

It returns it, as a "byte chain" (which is the bytes of the UTF-8 chain, not displayed as characters, but as a "byte chain").

Answer 2

Read up on Python types: bytes, bytearray

A Python string is a sequence (list) of characters. If we stick to ASCII each character can be represented by an 8 bit number.

But we don't stick to ASCII. Unicode gives us öäü€ß¹ etc

A Python string containing Unicode characters can need more than 1 byte per character.

Raw devices like files, serial ports etc return a bytes object describing all the Unicode characters as bytes.

Now a Unicode byte buffer can be converted to a string by:

mystring = mybytes.decode('utf-8')

which can raise an Exception if the it's not a valid utf-8 encoding.

Why all this complication?

Because files and devices are inherently byte devices, and strings which seem simple to humans are complex beasts for the Python engine.