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pythonbinaryieee-754bin

Read binary data (ieee-le) in Python

I'm trying to open a binary file in Python, for which in Matlab I'm using

data = fread(file, [rows, cols], 'float','ieee-le')

In Python I tried both

data = open(file,'rb').read() &

data = np.fromfile(file, dtype=data_type, count=count)

neither of which gave expected results (for data_type I tried all formats listed on the info page).

Just reading the data, the first 25 samples look like this:

b'\xe4\xa0B\xbc\x99\x9e\x1f\xbd\xc3\x07P>m\xe0\x96=\x0c\xf6\x8a=\x90\x86\t>)

While searching for solutions I stumbled over Python's struct package, but as I know close to nothing about data formats I was not able to use it to solve the problem. Any help would therefore be highly appreciated...

Solution

  • In numpy, ieee-le float type is '<f4', which reads "little endian floating point of 4 bytes".

    Thus you can open your file using:

    data = np.fromfile(filename, dtype='<f4', count=count)