I am working on a file conversion project that reads data from a one file format, reformats in and writes in out to another. The data is records of informations - names address, account number,statistics.
The numeric values in the original file are stored in what appears to be a "packed" data format,using a structure that does not use any of the more standard "C" formats, so I can't use the "struct" module. As an example, the number "1130" is store using 3 bytes. The HEX values of the 3 bytes would be 0x01,0x13,0x0F. In other words, the hex value value "01130f" is unpacked to become "1130". I believe the original program is written in a version of "Basic" that dates from the early 90's if that helps. Currently, I have no problem reading the data. I read the three bytes and use the binascii.hexilify() function convert the hex values to their corresponding ASCII values, and then slice off the trailing "f". In other words; unpackednumber = int(binascii.hexlify(0x1130f)[:-1]) My questions ... 1) Does anyone recognize this numeric format ? 2) Is there a more efficient module/function I can use, or is the above the best method? 3) I think that the trailing "f" is sometimes used to indicate the sign of the number and perhaps even the number of decimal places ... but am not sure. Any advice/guidance would be appreciated. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
