"""Text Utilities.

Those quick short utils are meant to make it easier to work with strings. For
instance: some allow smart casting values into bytes.
"""


def to_bytes(value):
    """Smart cast a value into a byte.

    Args:
        value (byte, str): a value to cast.

    Returns:
        byte: the result.
    """
    if not value:
        return b''

    if isinstance(value, bytes):
        return value

    return value.encode('utf8')