Convert unicode string to byte string

Question

I get a string from a function that is represented like u'\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0\xd1\x80\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0', but to process it I need it to be bytestring (like '\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0\xd1\x80\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0').

How do I convert it without changes?

My best guess so far is to take s.encode('unicode_escape'), which will return '\\xd0\\xbc\\xd0\\xb0\\xd1\\x80\\xd0\\xba\\xd0\\xb0' and process every 5 characters so that '\xd0' becomes one character represented as '\xd0'.

score 23 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 24 '12 at 03:46

23

ISO 8859-1 (aka Latin-1) maps the first 256 Unicode codepoints to their byte values.

>>> u'\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0\xd1\x80\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0'.encode('latin-1')
'\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0\xd1\x80\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0'

answered Jun 24 '12 at 03:46

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

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That's smart. My first option would be `bytes(map(ord, x))` but it may be much slower... – JBernardo Jun 24 '12 at 03:53
confirmed this produces the desired result – bryce Jun 24 '12 at 04:22
@JBernardo That only works in python 3; it's not clear from the text, but the odds are the OP is on python 2. – zwol Jun 25 '12 at 20:36
@Zack maybe you could use `str(bytearray(...))` instead of `bytes`. Or even worse: `''.join(map(chr, ...))` – JBernardo Jun 25 '12 at 22:13
throws 'ordinal not in range' – Nathan B Apr 28 '20 at 13:36

Convert unicode string to byte string

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