It is in Python 2, but not in Python 3, where str.encode() and bytes.decode() have been restricted to only convert between strings and bytes. >>> "foo".enc

It is in Python 2, but not in Python 3, where str.encode() and bytes.decode() have been restricted to only convert between strings and bytes. >>> "foo".encode('zlib') LookupError: 'zlib' is not a text encoding; use codecs.encode() to handle arbitrary codecs