Converting python string into bytes directly without eval()

Question

eval() seems to be dangerous to use when processing unknown strings, which is what a part of my project is doing.

For my project I have a string, called:

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Answer 1

yes, with ast.literal_eval which is safe since it only evaluates literals.

>>> import ast
>>> stringAsByte = "b'a'"
>>> ast.literal_eval(stringAsByte)
b'a'