Python Convert String to Byte

Question

I am trying to do some serial input and output operations, and one of those is to send an 8x8 array to an external device (Arduino). The pySerial library requires that the i

Answer 1

To transform a unicode string to a byte string in Python do this:

>>> 'foo'.encode('utf_8')
b'foo'

To transform a byte string to a unicode string:

>>> b'foo'.decode('utf_8')
'foo'

See encode and decode in the Standard library.

The available encodings are documented in this table. Commonly used ones are utf_8, utf_8_sig, ascii, latin_1 and cp1252. See UTF-8, BOM, ASCII, Latin-1 and Windows-1252 at Wikipedia.

Helpful for debbugging can be raw_unicode_escape. See this table.