Changing string to byte type in Python 2.7

You are not changing types, you are assigning a different value to a variable.

You are also hitting on one of the fundamental differences between python 2.x and 3.x; grossly simplified the 2.x type unicode has replaced the str type, which itself has been renamed to bytes. It happens to work in your code as more recent versions of Python 2 have added bytes as an alias for str to ease writing code that works under both versions.

In other words, your code is working as expected.

What can i do to change the type into a bytes type?

You can't, there is no such type as 'bytes' in Python 2.7.

From the Python 2.7 documentation (5.6 Sequence Types): "There are seven sequence types: strings, Unicode strings, lists, tuples, bytearrays, buffers, and xrange objects."

From the Python 3.2 documentation (5.6 Sequence Types): "There are six sequence types: strings, byte sequences (bytes objects), byte arrays (bytearray objects), lists, tuples, and range objects."