How to literally convert string to bytes?

Question

I have this following key in my app, which although the prefix, it is saved as a string and not bytes ( <class 'str'> ).

b'-----BEGIN RSA PUBLIC KEY-----\nMBgCEQCc5QP2pLttRTltj9QFdn1DAgMBAAE=\n-----END RSA PUBLIC KEY-----\n'

I try to convert is into bytes string, using bytes() or.encode, but both returns the following format which is not the same:

b"b'-----BEGIN RSA PUBLIC KEY-----\\nMBgCEQCc5QP2pLttRTltj9QFdn1DAgMBAAE=\\n-----END RSA PUBLIC KEY-----\\n'" <class 'bytes'>

Any clue on how to tell my program to just take this string as it is and read it as bytes?

Answer 1

You can use the bytes(string, enc) function.

Assuming that you're using utf-8 this should work with python3.

_string = "Some String"
_string_as_bytes = bytes(_string, 'utf-8')

EDIT: But what you have is the console output and that is displayed as b'Some String' , but you had that stored as if you had run _string = "b'Some String'" so you needed a substring of the original that trimmed away b' and the trailing ' .

so if you _string = _string[2:len(_string)-1] then you get the substring with the delimiter removed. Console displays it as 'Some String' and then you can make the call to bytes(...) as above.