Hi, Thanks for responding. I apologize about my lack of details, I was in a hurry when I wrote the initial question. I'll provide more details.
Basically, I'm attempting to write out unicode strings (16 bits per character) to a file. Before each string, I write out 4 bytes containing the number of characters (NOT BYTES) the string contains. I suppose the confusion comes in because I'm writing out both text information AND binary data at the same time. I suppose the consistent thing to do would be to write out the strings as binary instead of as text? I'm originally a C++ programmer and I'm still learning Python, so figuring out this problem is a little difficult for me. In my initial inquiry, I was writing out 5000 as an example, however this number would realistically be the number of characters in the string: len( u"Hello World" ). Once I write out these 4 bytes, I then write out the string "Hello World" immediately after the 4 bytes. You may be wondering why the crazy file format. The reason is because this python script is writing out data that will later be read in by a C++ application. The following works fine for ASCII strings: mystring = "Hello World" file = open( "somefile.txt", "wb" ) file.write( struct.pack ( "I", len(mystring) ) ) file.write( mystring ) Again I do apologize for the lack of detail. If I've still been unclear please don't hesitate to ask for more details. On 10/10/07, Carsten Haese <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 19:00 -0500, Robert Dailey wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I have opened a unicode file for writing: > > > > import codecs > > file = codecs.open( "somefile.dat", "wb", "utf-16" ) > > > > and I attempt to do this: > > > > file.write( struct.pack ( "I", 5000 ) ) > > > > However, this won't work because the encoding of the string returned > > by "pack" isn't unicode. I'm a bit confused right now as to how I can > > get this to work. I can't allow the unicode-ness of the file interfere > > with the actual order of the bytes that pack() is returning (In other > > words, don't pack NULL characters in there) > > Please start at the beginning. What are you actually trying to > accomplish and why do you think you need to write arbitrary binary data > into a file that is supposed to be a UTF-16 encoded Unicode text file? > > -- > Carsten Haese > http://informixdb.sourceforge.net > > > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list >
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