[Pythonmac-SIG] reading/writing binary data?
Joseph J. Strout
joe@strout.net
Wed, 20 Jan 1999 15:18:11 -0800
I need to read a data file composed of integers in binary (Mac) format. I
can't find anyway to do this -- it seems I can either open in text mode,
and read in strings, or open in binary mode, and read in raw characters.
That leaves me doing silly things like
def ReadInt4(file):
bytes = file.read(4)
return \
(ord(bytes[0]) << 24) | \
(ord(bytes[1]) << 16) | \
(ord(bytes[2]) << 8) | \
(ord(bytes[3]))
...and, needless to say, this is v e r y s l o w on large files.
Surely I'm missing the simple way to open a binary file and read in short
or long ints (or even whole lists of ints?) at once. Could somebody please
point out what I'm missing?
Thanks,
-- Joe
,------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Joseph J. Strout developer: MacOS, Unix, 3D, AI |
| joe@strout.net http://www.strout.net |
`------------------------------------------------------------------'