uncompyle6 gives success message but output is not readable

Question

I am trying to use uncompyle6 to decompile a .pyc code. I even tried --verify option. It says

Successfully decompiled file

but the output only contains strings like \xe0\xb3\x0bh\x90.

What should I do?

Answer 1

Something is wrong with your input .pyc file — probably it isn't a valid Python bytecode file (obtained from a valid .py source file).

\xe0, \xb3, \x0b, \x90 are hexadecimal codes for bytes which have no printable ASCII representation — mainly above 0x7F (127 decimal), but also the control character \x0b (VT - Vertical Tabulation).
(The letter h after \xb3 is an ASCII character.)

It's standard Python output for non-ASCII characters in binary sequence types (bytes / bytearrays / memoryview):

>>> bytes((33, 50, 65, 97))                  # ASCII chars
b'!2Aa'

>>> bytes((224, 179, 11, 144))               # non-ASCII (4 of "your" 5 bytes)
b'\xe0\xb3\x0b\x90'

The same for your byte sequence with non-ASCII and ASCII codes
(now for a change in hexadecimal):

>>> bytes((0xe0, 0xb3, 0x0b, 0x68, 0x90))    # "your" byte sequence
b'\xe0\xb3\x0bh\x90'