Python3: Reading a text/binary mixed file

Mon Mar 9 21:01:19 EDT 2015

On 03/09/2015 08:56 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 11:45 AM, Paulo da Silva
> <p_s_d_a_s_i_l_v_a_ns at netcabo.pt> wrote:
>> Hi!
>>>> What is the best way to read a file that begins with some few text lines
>> and whose rest is a binary stream?
>>>> As an exmaple ... files .pnm.
>>>> Thanks for any comments/help on this.
>> Read the entire file in binary mode, and figure out which parts are
> text and how they're encoded (possibly ASCII or UTF-8). Then take just
> those snippets, and decode them. Something like this:
>> data = open("some_file", "rb")

You accidentally omitted the part where you read() the data
data = data.read()
> text_part = data[2718:3142]
> decoded_text = text_part.decode("utf-8")
>> That'll give you a usable Unicode string, assuming you have your
> offsets and encoding correct.
>> ChrisA
>
-- 
DaveA