Instead of using encode/decode is it better to use str2bytes and
bytes2str, so that the types in Python 2 are unchanged. More important,
this prevents the double encoding of bytes, which causes problems
when they have non-ASCII data encoded.

Errors were being raised for returning `None` in Python 2
(due to a missing else branch) and for re-encoding bytes
in Python 2.

I changed the code to use str2bytes in the cases where bytes
are expected.