Write a binary integer or string to a file in python

Question

I have a string (it could be an integer too) in Python and I want to write it to a file. It contains only ones and zeros I want that pattern of ones and zeros to be written

Answer 1

To write out a string you can use the file's .write method. To write an integer, you will need to use the struct module

import struct

#...
with open('file.dat', 'wb') as f:
    if isinstance(value, int):
        f.write(struct.pack('i', value)) # write an int
    elif isinstance(value, str):
        f.write(value) # write a string
    else:
        raise TypeError('Can only write str or int')

However, the representation of int and string are different, you may with to use the bin function instead to turn it into a string of 0s and 1s

>>> bin(7)
'0b111'
>>> bin(7)[2:] #cut off the 0b
'111'

but maybe the best way to handle all these ints is to decide on a fixed width for the binary strings in the file and convert them like so:

>>> x = 7
>>> '{0:032b}'.format(x) #32 character wide binary number with '0' as filler
'00000000000000000000000000000111'