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? stackoverflow.com/questions/22229229/… — DMe
– DMe, Commented Apr 29, 2017 at 2:28

lvc · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-29 02:50:28Z

1

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.

answered Apr 29, 2017 at 2:50

lvc

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Comments

AlwaysLearning · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-29 02:30:33Z

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, 2017 at 2:30

AlwaysLearning

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1 Comment

gmmo Over a year ago

that will do it.

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