python - Convert unicode string to byte string

Question

I get a string from a function that is represented like u'xd0xbcxd0xb0xd1x80xd0xbaxd0xb0', but to process it I need it to be bytestring (like 'xd0xbcxd0xb0xd1x80xd0xbaxd0xb0').

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'.

Answer 1

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

>>> u'xd0xbcxd0xb0xd1x80xd0xbaxd0xb0'.encode('latin-1')
'xd0xbcxd0xb0xd1x80xd0xbaxd0xb0'