CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-2.7binary
user2803250
user2803250

Reputation: 111

Python how to read raw binary from a file? (audio/video/text)

I want to read the raw binary of a file and put it into a string. Currently I am opening a file with the "rb" flag and printing the byte but it's coming up as ASCII characters (for text that is, for video and audio files it's giving symbols and gibberish). I'd like to get the raw 0's and 1's if possible. This needs to work for audio and video files as well so simply converting the ascii to binary isn't an option.

with open(filePath, "rb") as file:
    byte = file.read(1)
    print byte

Upvotes: 10

Views: 54928

Answers (2)

Holy Mackerel
Holy Mackerel

Reputation: 3279

to get the binary representation I think you will need to import binascii, then:

byte = f.read(1)
binary_string = bin(int(binascii.hexlify(byte), 16))[2:].zfill(8)

or, broken down:

import binascii


filePath = "mysong.mp3"
file = open(filePath, "rb")
with file:
    byte = file.read(1)
    hexadecimal = binascii.hexlify(byte)
    decimal = int(hexadecimal, 16)
    binary = bin(decimal)[2:].zfill(8)
    print("hex: %s, decimal: %s, binary: %s" % (hexadecimal, decimal, binary))

will output:

hex: 64, decimal: 100, binary: 01100100

Upvotes: 9

bruno desthuilliers
bruno desthuilliers

Reputation: 77912

What you are reading IS really the "raw binary" content of your "binary" file. Strange as it might seems, binary data are not "0's and 1's" but binary words (aka bytes, cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte) which have an integer (base 10) value and can be interpreted as ascii chars. Or as integers (which is how one usually do binary operations). Or as hexadecimal. For what it's worth, "text" is actually "raw binary data" too.

To get a "binary" representation you can have a look here : Convert binary to ASCII and vice versa but that's not going to give you more "raw binary data" than what you actually have...

Now the question: why do you want these data as "0's and 1's" exactly ?

Upvotes: 10

Related Questions