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

[Peter Daum]

On 2012-03-28 11:02, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 7:56 PM, Peter Daum <gator at cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote:
>> is there any way to convert a string to bytes without
>> interpreting the data in any way? Something like:
>>
>> s='abcde'
>> b=bytes(s, "unchanged")
> 
> What is a string? It's not a series of bytes. You can't convert it
> without encoding those characters into bytes in some way.

... in my example, the variable s points to a "string", i.e. a series of
bytes, (0x61,0x62 ...) interpreted as ascii/unicode characters.

b=bytes(s,'ascii') # or ('utf-8', 'latin1', ...)

would of course work in this case, but in general, if s holds any
data with bytes > 127, the actual data will be changed according
to the provided encoding.

What I am looking for is a general way to just copy the raw data
from a "string" object to a "byte" object without any attempt to
"decode" or "encode" anything ...

Regards,
                        Peter