Reading a binary file with python

Read the binary file content like this:

with open(fileName, mode='rb') as file: # b is important -> binary
    fileContent = file.read()

then “unpack” binary data using struct.unpack:

The start bytes: struct.unpack("iiiii", fileContent[:20])

The body: ignore the heading bytes and the trailing byte (= 24); The remaining part forms the body, to know the number of bytes in the body do an integer division by 4; The obtained quotient is multiplied by the string 'i' to create the correct format for the unpack method:

struct.unpack("i" * ((len(fileContent) -24) // 4), fileContent[20:-4])

The end byte: struct.unpack("i", fileContent[-4:])

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