Convert a binary file into an array of integers directly in python?

Question

I am trying to read binary file into a list of bytes. I was looking into this thread but it only gives me an array of characters.

How do I convert string characters into a list?

More or less what I want is this:

with open("decompressed_data.bin", mode='rb') as file:
    fileContent = file.read()
myStrList = list(fileContent)
# then convert this to a list of integers directly.
myIntList = convertToIntList(myStrList)

Is there a way to convert this list of characters into a list of integers without looping through every character?

Better yet, can I read the binary file direct into a list of integers the Python way?

Does this help at all? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22229229/reading-4-byte-integers-from-binary-file-in-python — Deem, Apr 29 '17 at 02:28

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 29 '17 at 02:50

Python 3s updated open, available as io.open in Python 2.7, will do this directly. Although it may be printed resembling a character string, the object returned by read on a binary file is a bytes object, which behaves as a sequence of integers. You can see this if you print the element at a particular index, or by noticing it yields ints when you iterate over it.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 29 '17 at 02:30

0

In python, you have the binascii module in the standard library. For example:

binascii.hexlify(data)

return the hexadecimal representation of the binary data. that is, each byte gets converted into a two-digit hex integer representation. Does that help you out?

answered Apr 29 '17 at 02:30

AlwaysLearning

796
3
10

that will do it. – gmmo Apr 30 '17 at 14:25

Convert a binary file into an array of integers directly in python?

2 Answers2