Exactly the same behavior between Java String.getBytes() and Python string -> bytes?

Question

In my Java code I have the following snippet :

String secret = "secret";
byte[] thebytes = secret.getBytes();

I would like to have exactly the same result in python. How can I do that ?

secret = 'secret'
thebytes = ??? ??? ???

Thanks.

EDIT:

In addition, it will be interesting to have the solution for Python 2.x and 3.x

Answer 1

In python-2.7 there's bytearray():

>>> s = 'secret'
>>> b = bytearray(s)
>>> for i in b:
...    print i
115
101
99
114
101
116

If this is what you're looking for.

Answer 2

This is not as simple as it might first seem, because Python has historically conflated byte arrays and strings. The short answer, in Python 3, is

secret = "secret"
secret.encode()

But you should read up on how Python deals with unicode, strings and bytes.