What is the equivalent of 'fread' from Matlab in Python?

Question

I have practically no knowledge of Matlab, and need to translate some parsing routines into Python. They are for large files, that are themselves divided into \'blocks\', an

Answer 1

From the documentation of fread, it is a function to read binary data. The second argument specifies the size of the output vector, the third one the size/type of the items read.

In order to recreate this in Python, you can use the array module:

f = open(...)
import array
a = array.array("L")  # L is the typecode for uint32
a.fromfile(f, 3)

This will read read three uint32 values from the file f, which are available in a afterwards. From the documentation of fromfile:

Read n items (as machine values) from the file object f and append them to the end of the array. If less than n items are available, EOFError is raised, but the items that were available are still inserted into the array. f must be a real built-in file object; something else with a read() method won’t do.

Arrays implement the sequence protocol and therefore support the same operations as lists, but you can also use the .tolist() method to create a normal list from the array.