public static byte[] prepareUserEndPoint(final String userEndPoint) {
        if (userEndPoint == null) {
            return new byte[0];
        } else {
            return userEndPoint.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
        }
    }
@throws TaskAssignmentException if method fails to encode the data
streams/src/test/java/org/apache/kafka/streams/processor/internals/assignment/LegacySubscriptionInfoSerde.java