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

Depending on your needs, this can be one step or two steps

1. use encode() to convert string to bytes, immutable
2. use bytearray() to convert bytes to bytearray, mutable

s="ABCD"
encoded=s.encode('utf-8')
array=bytearray(encoded)

The following validation is done in Python 3.7

>>> s="ABCD"
>>> encoded=s.encode('utf-8')
>>> encoded
b'ABCD'
>>> array=bytearray(encoded)
>>> array
bytearray(b'ABCD')