java's getByte() equivalent in python

Question

I am a nebie to python. I have a java method which accepts a string, converts the string to a byte array and returns the byte array. The method looks like this.

private static byte[] convert(String str) {
        byte[] byteArray = str.getBytes();
        return byteArray;
    }

convert("sr_shah") results in a byte array like this 115 114 95 115 104 97 104 . On using Charset.defaultCharset() i came to know that my machine's dfault charectorset is windows-1252 .

Now i need to create exact equivalent of the above method in Python. The problem i am facing now is with converting string to bytearray. I am unable to get java's getBytes() equivalent in python. I searched in internet and took many help from stackoverflow's previous posts on converting string to byte array but unfortunately none of them worked for me.

The methods i used are bytearray(),bytes(),str.encode() . I used encodings like windows-1252,utf_16,utf_8,utf_16_le,utf_16_be,iso-8859-1 unfortunately none of them give the right result as i expected(ie like the byte array i got from java getBytes()) . I am not getting what wrong thing am i doing. this is how i tried in python.

>>> bytearray('sr_shah','windows-1252')
bytearray(b'sr_shah')
>>> bytearray('sr_shah','utf_8')
bytearray(b'sr_shah')
>>> bytearray('sr_ahah','utf_16')
bytearray(b'sr_ahah')
>>> bytearray('sr_shah','utf_16_le')
bytearray(b'sr_shah')
>>> name = 'sr_shah'
>>> name.encode('windows-1252')
'sr_shah'
>>> name.encode('utf_8')
'sr_shah'
>>> name.encode('latin_1')
'sr_shah'
>>> name.encode('iso-8859-1')
'sr_shah'
>>> name.encode('utf-8')
'sr_shah'
>>> name.encode('utf-16')
'\xff\xfes\x00r\x00_\x00s\x00h\x00a\x00h\x00'
>>> name.encode('utf-16-le')
's\x00r\x00_\x00s\x00h\x00a\x00h\x00'
>>> 

Please help me to get the right conversion.

Answer 1

You can do this:

str = 'sr_shah'
b = [ord(s) for s in str]
print b

**Output**

[115, 114, 95, 115, 104, 97, 104]

the ord() built-in function is as close as I know to the getByte() function you want, although it works on single characters, so you need to deal with the arrays yourself.

Answer 2

The bytearray you have created in Python contains the bytes you want. To see their decimal representation, print the bytes one by one:

>>> for x in bytearray('sr_shah','windows-1252'): print(x)
...
115
114
95
115
104
97
104