---
id: morphys
version: "1.0"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: abandoned
---

# morphys — Smart conversions between unicode and bytes types for common cases

License: permissive · Maintenance: abandoned · Downloads: 196.6K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Morphys is a lightweight utility library for handling the inconsistency between unicode and bytes types in Python 2, where non-ASCII characters can cause unexpected errors. It provides two main conversion functions—ensure_bytes() and ensure_unicode()—that intelligently convert between types only when necessary, and a StrMorpher class that wraps a string to behave as either type on demand. The library also supports custom encodings and defaults to utf-8.

While the package remains compatible with Python 3, it has received no maintenance since 2017-01-10 and was designed primarily for Python 2's unicode/bytes complexity, making it largely obsolete for new projects.

Use it for:

- Normalize inconsistent string types from libraries that return either bytes or unicode unpredictably
- Handle legacy codebases that mix unicode and bytes strings without explicit type checking
- Wrap strings in StrMorpher when code needs to accept both bytes and unicode interchangeably
- Ensure consistent string type handling before passing data to functions with strict type requirements

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Morphys provides utility functions to convert between unicode and bytes types, handling encoding/decoding transparently and returning objects unchanged if already the correct type.

No. The package is abandoned (last update 2017-01-06) and designed primarily for Python 2. While it has no known vulnerabilities and installs easily, modern Python 3 projects have no practical need for this library. Only consider it for maintaining legacy Python 2 codebases.

## Install

pip install morphys
uv add morphys
poetry add morphys

## Installing morphys

Before you install: Installation is frictionless with no runtime dependencies. However, the package has been abandoned since its single release with no updates since 2017-01-06, making it unsuitable for active projects.

License in practice: MIT license permits unrestricted use, modification, and distribution with minimal restrictions, suitable for both open-source and proprietary projects.

Quickstart:

pip install morphys

from morphys import ensure_bytes, ensure_unicode

result = ensure_unicode(b'hello')
result = ensure_bytes('hello')

Verify before relying:

- Whether ensure_bytes and ensure_unicode handle all edge cases with non-ASCII content reliably
- Whether StrMorpher's lazy conversion approach works correctly across all contexts
- Current compatibility with modern Python 3 versions beyond the unspecified support claim

## Package facts

- License: MIT (permissive)
- Python support: unspecified
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: abandoned
- Downloads: 196.6K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

unicode bytes conversion, string type coercion, ensure bytes unicode, python 2 string handling, smart string conversion, bytes unicode wrapper, encoding decoding utilities, python-2-legacy, string-handling

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/morphys) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/morphys/)