Python: convert string to byte array

Question

Say that I have a 4 character string, and I want to convert this string into a byte array where each character in the string is translated into its hex equivalent. e.g.

Answer 1

Just use a bytearray() which is a list of bytes.

Python2:

s = "ABCD"
b = bytearray()
b.extend(s)

Python3:

s = "ABCD"
b = bytearray()
b.extend(map(ord, s))

By the way, don't use str as a variable name since that is builtin.