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Comment by billfruit | Hacker News Reader

In general though, dealing with binary data in python isn't particularly intuitive.Also many python tutorials and books fails to mentioned how to manipulate binary data. I feel that is one of the places where the standard library is not that rich.

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I disagree. The struct and array (not Numpy) modules are pretty great at cutting up binary data. You provide a format string and it just works.

your statement and his statement are both True (Python spelling variant). Of course, I don't think there are many books or tutorials geared towards beginners that deal with manipulating binary data.

> Also many python tutorials and books fails to mentioned how to manipulate binary data

Might be useful for beginners to binary file I/O in Python and reverse engineering of data formats:

DBFReader.py [1], which is part of my xtopdf toolkit [2] is a program that uses struct.unpack() multiple times to decode the fields in a DBF (XBASE) file.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf/src/default/DBFReade...

[2] http://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf

I had first written a Pascal program to read and dump DBF file data after reverse-engineering the DBF format, based on some sketchy info I had access to, years ago. Later wrote the same program in C, and later still in Python, i.e. DBFReader.py .

I thought, the format string is unintutive if there are nested binary structures or if there are arrays of nested binary structures.

I do wish they were combined. It would be nice to handle arrays of structs and structs of arrays more gracefully, and it's unfortunate how the format strings almost (but not really) agree with each other.

And so long as I'm asking for ponies, it would also be nice if they handled complex numbers gracefully.

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