It was honestly pretty simple, since the 'jwt.encode' method outputs a bytes object and not a string, I ended up sending something that looked like this to my front end application:

b'the_jwt_token'

instead of just the token itself.

The problem arose when I tried to use the token for authorization (decode it), where it would throw an 'invalid header padding warning' because I was sending the bytes object of the token, instead of the string of the token itself.

Hope that makes sense.

@moomoolive @auvipy I think this PR should be reverted as it seems that #513 actually made encode return a string. PyJWT.encode() uses its base class' encode method which returns string, see

@tlinhart although the line of code you referenced above should have solved the problem it doesn't seem to, at least when I try it in my terminal. (BTW I'm using the latest distribution of library 1.7.1)

It only becomes a string when I decode the token with ASCII.

Maybe decoding needs to be in ASCII??

Well, in 1.7.1 it returns bytes, but not in master. The current (master) version returns str and thus this PR (which was merged into master 8 days ago) should be reverted.

@tlinhart was right on this:

Well, in 1.7.1 it returns bytes, but not in master. The current (master) version returns str and thus this PR (which was merged into master 8 days ago) should be reverted.

And, to document my investigation findings here: even though this PR was mentioned in the v2.0.0 release notes and changelogs, but that line was indeed reverted subsequently. In other words, encode(...) returns a string, not bytes.