Reading and Writing Binary Files in Python: A Practical Guide

Unlock the Power of Binary Data with Python’s Built-in Tools

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Working with binary files is a common task in many programming projects, whether you’re dealing with image data, audio files, or any other type of non-text data. Python provides a straightforward and efficient way to handle binary files through its built-in modules.

In this article, we’ll explore how to read and write binary files in Python, complete with up-to-date code examples.

Reading Binary Files

To read a binary file in Python, you can use the open() function with the 'rb' mode, which stands for "read binary." Here's an example:

with open('example.bin', 'rb') as file:
    binary_data = file.read()

In this code snippet, we open the file 'example.bin' in binary read mode using the open() function with the 'rb' mode. The with statement ensures that the file is properly closed after we're done reading from it, even if an exception occurs.

The read() method reads the entire contents of the file and returns them as bytes. If you want to read a specific number of bytes, you can pass an integer argument to the read() method, like this: