Reading binary file and looping over each byte

Question

In Python, how do I read in a binary file and loop over each byte of that file?

Answer 1

If you have a lot of binary data to read, you might want to consider the struct module. It is documented as converting "between C and Python types", but of course, bytes are bytes, and whether those were created as C types does not matter. For example, if your binary data contains two 2-byte integers and one 4-byte integer, you can read them as follows (example taken from struct documentation):

>>> struct.unpack('hhl', b'\x00\x01\x00\x02\x00\x00\x00\x03')
(1, 2, 3)

You might find this more convenient, faster, or both, than explicitly looping over the content of a file.