Perl's pack/unpack functions

[John Hunter]

>>>>> "Matthew" == Matthew Diephouse <fokke_wulf at hotmail.com> writes:

    Matthew> I'm looking at learning Python, and the first app I want
    Matthew> to write needs to be able to take a binary file and
    Matthew> pack/unpack the data into hex form, and then into binary
    Matthew> form. In Perl, you can do this using pack/unpack, but I
    Matthew> don't see these functions in Python. So how would you do
    Matthew> this in Python?

See the 'pack' function of module struct

http://python.org/doc/current/lib/module-struct.html


Here is an example that writes 2.5 GB of long integers in binary (I
wanted to test my python large file support build)

import struct
fd = open('test.out', 'w')

GB = 250000000L   # each long is 4 bytes so 250000000 is 1 GB
for i in xrange( long(2.5*GB) ):
    fd.write( struct.pack('L', i) )