Python3 and hmac . How to handle string not being binary

Question

I had a script in Python2 that was working great.

def _generate_signature(data):
   return hmac.new(\'key\', data, hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()

Answer 1

Not to resurrect an old question but I did want to add something I feel is missing from this answer, to which I had trouble finding an appropriate explanation/example of anywhere else:

Aquiles Carattino was pretty close with his attempt at converting the string to bytes, but was missing the second argument, the encoding of the string to be converted to bytes.

If someone would like to convert a string to bytes through some other means than static assignment (such as reading from a config file or a DB), the following should work:

(Python 3+ only, not compatible with Python 2)

import hmac, hashlib

def _generate_signature(data):
  key = 'key' # Defined as a simple string.
  key_bytes= bytes(key , 'latin-1') # Commonly 'latin-1' or 'utf-8'
  data_bytes = bytes(data, 'latin-1') # Assumes `data` is also a string.
  return hmac.new(key_bytes, data_bytes , hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()

print(
  _generate_signature('this is my string of data')
)