Convert unicode string to byte string

Question

I get a string from a function that is represented like `u'\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0\xd1\x80\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0'`, but to process it I need it to be bytestring (like `'\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0\xd1\x80\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0'`). How do I convert it without changes? My best guess so far is to take `s.encode('unicode_escape')`, which will return `'\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0\xd1\x80\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0'` and process every 5 characters so that '\xd0' becomes one character represented as '\xd0'.

Accepted Answer

ISO 8859-1 (aka Latin-1) maps the first 256 Unicode codepoints to their byte values.

```
>>> u'\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0\xd1\x80\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0'.encode('latin-1')
'\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0\xd1\x80\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0'
```

Convert unicode string to byte string

Solution

Problem