Why are these two strings not equal in Python?

I have a simple python code sample

import json
hello = json.dumps("hello")
print(type(hello))

if hello == "hello":
    print("They are equal")
else:
    print("They are not equal")

This is evaluating to "They are not equal". I don’t understand why these values are not equal.

I’m re-familiarizing myself with Python but I read that this "==" can be used as an operator to compare strings in Python. I also printed the type of hello which evaluates to "str"

Can someone clarify this?

>Solution :

The behavior becomes much more clear once you print out the result from json.dumps():

print("hello", len("hello"))
print(hello, len(hello))

This outputs:

hello 5
"hello" 7

json.dumps() adds extra quotation marks — you can see that the lengths of the two strings aren’t the same. This is why your check fails.