[Baypiggies] Raw file input and python

[Michael Pittaro]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Glen Jarvis <glen at glenjarvis.com> wrote:

> Oh, and I'm constrained to Python 2.5 or lower only :(
>
> Glen
>
> On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Glen Jarvis <glen at glenjarvis.com> wrote:
>
>> I remember, about three years ago, reading someone's answer to a question
>> very similar to this. But, I can't find it now.
>>
>> I have a raw input file where the first "entity" is a 64-bit unsigned
>> integer and the remaining items in the file are 32-bit unsigned integers
>> (until the end of the file).
>>
>> I vaguely remember there was already a module to cleanly handle this. I
>> could, of course, open the file (f) in binary mode and do an f.read() on
>> each byte and figure thing out. But, one will have to think of byte
>> swapping, variable "sizes", etc. when running on different systems.
>>
>> I thought there was a layer above this that would take care of the mapping
>> of data in the file (i.e., a raw dump/raw read) to a set of variables,
>> taking care of byte swapping if needed, size of types, etc. as long as I
>> specified the format (i.e., first should be 64-bit unsigned, second... etc.)
>>
>> Am I mistaking that this exists (i.e., did I just make this up)?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>
>>
You probably are thinking of struct  - perfect for byte level unpacking of
records.

http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/struct/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/baypiggies/attachments/20110212/7aa19068/attachment.html>