String to bytes in both Python 2 and 3

You can check the version using sys.version_info:

if sys.version_info < (3, 0):
    data = bytes(data)
else:
    data = bytes(data, 'utf8')

It is more pythonic than relying on exceptions.

This works with both version. i.e. python 2 and python 3

data = bytes(str(data).encode("utf-8"))

If you're using the six py2/3 compatibility library, you may prefer:

import six
data = bytes(data) if six.PY2 else bytes(data, 'utf8')

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