Can't get redirection to stdout to work properly

Question

After figuring out that functions like os.system() return an error code (which I don't want), I've tried the fixes from these links:

• Assign output of os.system to a variable and prevent it from being displayed on the screen

• Redirect stdout to a file in Python?

• Any way to assign terminal output to variable with python?

All of the suggestions work, except that my output (this has been tested on at least 5 different commands) all comes out like this:

Fixing b'org.kde.Platform/x86_64/5.12\n'...
Fixing b'org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/19.08\n'...
Fixing b'org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/19.08\n'...
Fixing b'org.freedesktop.Sdk/x86_64/19.08\n'...
Fixing b'org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/19.08\n'...

Why am I getting the b' and \n' at the beginning and end of each line? Even simple tests with commands like whoami print this extra garbage. I tried cutting the string, like this:

temp = temp[2:-3]

and it cuts from the data I want (b'org.kde.Platform/x86_64/5.12\n' becomes b'g.kde.Platform/x86_64/5\n') and not the aforementioned stuff.