Reading unformatted big-endian files

[Andrea Gavana]

Hello John,

>Silently ignoring errors when reading a file doesn't sound like a good
>idea to me at all, especially if different records have different
>formats.

Yeah, you're right, but the file itself is quite big and I am
interested only in a small part of it. Moreover, the sequence
keyword-number-keytype is unlikely to fail to be read unless the
simulator that outputs the file does something very strange.

> (a) read the docs on the struct module

Yes, I have done it, and I have written something similar to what you
propose (well, actually your solution is more elegant than mine :-D )

>        if keyword == 'DIMENS':
>            # 'dimens' is neither declared nor initialised in the FORTRAN
>            # so I'm just guessing here ...

Sorry, I forgot to include it, 'dimens' is an integer(4)

Thank you very much for your explanation, now it is very clear what I
should do. I hope performances will not change so much: fortran is
very fast in reading files (but I use it only in this case, I love to
use Python)... well, let's see :-D

Andrea.

-- 
"Imagination Is The Only Weapon In The War Against Reality."

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