"convert" string to bytes without changing data (encoding)

[Grant Edwards]

On 2012-03-28, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:43:36 +0200, Peter Daum wrote:
>
>> The longer story of my question is: I am new to python (obviously), and
>> since I am not familiar with either one, I thought it would be advisory
>> to go for python 3.x. The biggest problem that I am facing is, that I am
>> often dealing with data, that is basically text, but it can contain
>> 8-bit bytes. 
>
> All bytes are 8-bit, at least on modern hardware. I think you have to
> go back to the 1950s to find 10-bit or 12-bit machines.

Well, on anything likely to run Python that's true.  There are modern
DSP-oriented CPUs where a byte is 16 or 32 bits (and so is an int and
a long, and a float and a double).

>> As it seems, this would be far easier with python 2.x. 
>
> It only seems that way until you try.

It's easy as long as you deal with nothing but ASCII and Latin-1. ;)

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