Creating an array with a bytes object as initializer
should treat the bytes as it treats a string.
Not doing this broke re.compile() of big charsets.
diff --git a/Lib/sre_compile.py b/Lib/sre_compile.py
index 6b28052..5b66084 100644
--- a/Lib/sre_compile.py
+++ b/Lib/sre_compile.py
@@ -353,6 +353,7 @@
     # Convert byte array to word array
     mapping = array.array(code, mapping)
     assert mapping.itemsize == _sre.CODESIZE
+    assert len(mapping) * mapping.itemsize == 256
     header = header + mapping.tolist()
     data[0:0] = header
     return [(BIGCHARSET, data)]
diff --git a/Lib/test/test_array.py b/Lib/test/test_array.py
index 9b11edf..cf5c2e8 100755
--- a/Lib/test/test_array.py
+++ b/Lib/test/test_array.py
@@ -700,6 +700,10 @@
         # SF bug #1486663 -- this used to erroneously raise a TypeError
         ArraySubclassWithKwargs('b', newarg=1)
 
+    def test_create_from_bytes(self):
+        a = array.array('H', b"1234")
+        self.assertEqual(len(a) * a.itemsize, 4)
+
 
 class StringTest(BaseTest):