To be perfectly clear: bytes (b'') is not a string. Again: bytes is NOT a string. It is an array of octets, aka bytes, aka unsigned 8 bit integers. NOT characters. NOT a string.
If you are dealing with bytes that are encoded representations of a string, then you have to know what encoding they use to decode them and treat them as strings.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you don't know what the encoding of the input file is you have a problem. As far as I know there are libraries to guess the encoding, but it cannot be determined completely accurate.
