[takeda]

Not really.

Veedrac had a good analogy, think of text as something abstract, for example imagine text is an image or sound, if you want to store it in bytes you need to encode it, and to read back you decode it.

As to_bytes/from_bytes, actually python provides it too:

to_bytes -> bytes(<text>)

from_bytes -> str(<bytes>)

[odonnellryan]

It makes sense for sure, just isn't super intuitive - if it was people wouldn't be so confused.