Re: How to modify the data in a binary file?

[=?utf-8?q?C=C3=A9dric_Lucantis?=]

Le Wednesday 02 July 2008 14:05:39 Jim Brown, vous avez écritÂ*:

Hi all, I'm a Python newbie, so please pardon me if my question may look a
little silly. :)

I want to modify a binary file p.data (which has some C-style "short"
integers -- 16-bit integers) in such a way:
The bit m and bit n of every "short int" si in the file are set to 1, and
the left bits in si are not affected.

I.e, for the first short int in the file, I think the code would be:

import os
f = os.open("/root/p.data", os.O_RDWR)
str = os.read(f, 2)

#assume the short int in str is 0x0102, and I want to change it to 0x8182
(changing bit7 and bit15 to 1).
#how to change the str into a short int variable si??
???

si = (si & ~0x8080) | 0x8080

You can either do it by hand by splitting your string in chars and getting the
bytes values with ord (described here:
http://docs.python.org/lib/built-in-funcs.html) :

byte0 = ord(s[0])
byte1 = ord(s[1])
si = (byte0 << 8) | byte1 # or maybe the inverse ?

or use the struct module:

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-struct.html

--
Cédric Lucantis