PI: Remove b_ calls

[MartinThoma]

Function calls are cheap, but not for free in Python.
The b_ function converts a string to a bytes object. When we have
a constant string, we can use the constant byte representation
instead (a b"byte literal" instead of b_("string literal"))

[shubhamshah02]

If b_ doesn't work anymore, what do we replace it with? I'm having issues updating the PyPDF2 module because my code uses b_.

[MartinThoma]

You don't need b("foo") any longer. Literal strings "foo" can be converted to b"foo". Otherwise you should have byte objects already.

For simplicty, you can do this:

def b_(s):
    if type(s) == bytes:
        return s
    else:
        try:
            r = s.encode("latin-1")
            return r
        except Exception:
            r = s.encode("utf-8")
            return r

However, I strongly encourage you to look carefully if you can simply drop using b_(...) everywhere.

[shubhamshah02]

You don't need b("foo") any longer. Literal strings "foo" can be converted to b"foo". Otherwise you should have byte objects already.

For simplicty, you can do this:

def b_(s):
    if type(s) == bytes:
        return s
    else:
        try:
            r = s.encode("latin-1")
            return r
        except Exception:
            r = s.encode("utf-8")
            return r

However, I strongly encourage you to look carefully if you can simply drop using b_(...) everywhere.

Appreciate it, worked like a charm :)

[pubpub-zz]

@shubhamshah02, an other useful encoding is charmap which converts bytes literally: b"\xFE" -> "\xFE"