How to convert byte string to bytes in Python?

Question

I'm a total beginner in python and i have a set of byte values in a CSV file which i want to process. Sample values are mentioned below

"b'\xaa'"
"b'\x04'"

 data1 = pd.read_csv("test.csv", usecols=[1])
 for value in data1.values.flatten():
 print(int.from_bytes(value, byteorder='big'))

When running the above code i get the error saying

TypeError: cannot convert 'str' object to bytes

because it is read as a string. How could I pass this string as bytes and use it in the above code?

I'm using Python 3.7.

Answer 1

You can try

>>> x = "b'\xaa'"
>>> int.from_bytes(x.encode('utf-8'), byteorder="big")
421573863975
>>> x = "b'\x04'"
>>> int.from_bytes(x.encode('utf-8'), byteorder="big")
1646724135

• blueteeth: I suspect this is the wrong answer because presumably this string is created by doing str(int.to_bytes(170, length=1, byteorder='big')). The reverse would be extracting \xaa and finding the integer value of that (which is 170).
• Lakshin Karunaratne: Yes blueteeth is correct. This answer is wrong. If the string is "b'\xaa'" I want to retrieve 170.