How to loop over a binary file in Python in chunks

Question

I\'m trying to use Python to loop over a long binary file filled with 8-byte records.

Each record has the format [ uint16 | uint16 | uint32 ]
(which

Answer 1

The iter builtin, if passed a callable and a sentinel value will call the callable repeatedly until the sentinel value is returned.

So you can create a partial function with functools.partial (or use a lambda) and pass it to iter, like this:

with open('foo.bin', 'rb') as f:
    chunker = functools.partial(f.read, 8)
    for chunk in iter(chunker, b''):      # Read 8 byte chunks until empty byte returned
        # Do stuff with chunk

Answer 2

f.read(len) only returns a byte string. Then raw will be a single byte.

The correct way of looping is:

with open(fname, 'rb') as f:
    while True:
        raw = f.read(8)
        if len(raw)!=8:
            break # ignore the incomplete "record" if any
        record = struct.unpack("HHI", raw )
        print(record)

Answer 3

I've never used this before, but it looks like an initialization issue:

   with open(fname, "rb") as f:
        fmt = 'HHI'
        raw=struct.pack(fmt,1,2,3)
        len=struct.calcsize(fmt)
        print(len)               # This shows 8, as expected 
        for raw in f.read(len):  # Expect this should read 8 bytes into raw
            print(type(raw))     # This says raw is an 'int', not a byte-array
            record=struct.unpack(fmt, raw ) # "TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'int'"
            print(record)

You may want to look at iter_unpack() for optimization if you have adequate ram.

Note that in 3.7, the default value changes from bytes to string. see near end of page https://docs.python.org/3/library/struct.html#struct.pack