How to convert a string representation of 'bytes' to its corresponding 'utf-8' in Python? (Python 3.7)

Question

The bytes data is stored as a string in a variable.

Eg: x = "\x61\x62\x63"

I need to convert this to its corresponding UTF-8. (In this case "abc").

I tried to convert it to bytes and then decode it, but the result was the input itself.

Answer 1

>>> x = "\x61\x62\x63"
>>> x
'abc'
>>> bytes(x, 'utf-8')
b'abc'
>>> str(bytes(x, 'utf-8'))[2:-1]
'abc'

Answer 2

Even though, I would not recommend to use eval in production, you could do the following:

import ast
x = r"\x61\x62\x63"
code = 'b"{0}"'.format(x)
b = ast.literal_eval(code)
b.decode('utf-8')

Edit: IIRC, the format string came with a later python version, so use 'b"{0}".format(x)'.

Edit: Added comment by Mark Tolonen.