from __future__ import absolute_import, division, print_function, unicode_literals import locale import sys sys_encoding = locale.getpreferredencoding() USING_PYTHON2 = True if sys.version_info < (3, 0) else False if USING_PYTHON2: str = unicode # noqa else: str = str def ensure_bytes(x, encoding=sys_encoding): if not isinstance(x, bytes): x = x.encode(encoding) return x def ensure_str(x, encoding=sys_encoding): if not isinstance(x, str): x = x.decode(encoding) return x