Convert bytes to ascii and back save in Python?

Question

I'm Using python 3.5

I have a couple of byte strings representing text that is encoded in various codecs so: b'mybytesstring' , now some are Utf8 encoded other are latin1 and so on. What I want to in the following order is:

• transform the bytes string into an ascii like string.
• transform the ascii like string back to a bytes string.
• decode the bytes string with correct codec.

The problem is that I have to move the bytes string into something that does not accept bytes objects so I'm looking for a solution that lets me do bytes -> ascii -> bytes safely.

Answer 1

OK I found a solution which is much easier than I thought

mybytes = 'ëýđþé'.encode()
str_mybytes = str(mybytes)
again_mybytes = eval(str_mybytes)
decoded = again_mybytes.decode('utf8')

Answer 2

You use the encode and decode methods for this, and supply the desired encoding to them. It's not clear to me if you know the encoding beforehand. If you don't know it you're in trouble. You may have to guess the encoding in some way, risking garbage output.

Answer 3

x = x.decode().encode('ascii',errors='ignore')