title: How to Treat Strings as Bytes in Python 3.7.9?
body: <p>I have a list of values as below:</p>
  <pre><code>byte_values = [&quot;\x00&quot;, &quot;\x02&quot;, ... ]
  </code></pre>
  <p>They are meant to be byte values, and I would like to convert them to <code>ASCII</code>. However, because there's no <code>b</code> in front of them, Python treats them as strings and the decode method doesn't work. Is there a way to get Python to treat these strings as bytes and convert them to actual strings that make sense?</p>