On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 9:22 AM, <f...@slick.airforce-one.org> wrote: > I have to read the contents of a binary file (a PNG file exactly), and > dump it into an RTF file. > > The RTF-file has been opened with codecs.open in utf-8 mode. > > As I expected, the utf-8 decoder
You mean encoder. > chokes on some combinations of bits; Well yeah, it's supposed to be getting *characters*, not bytes. > how can I tell python to dump the bytes as they are, without > interpreting them? Go around the encoder and write bytes directly to the file: # Disclaimer: Completely untested import codecs raw_rtf = open("path/to/rtf.rtf", 'w') png = open("path/to/png.png", 'r') writer_factory = codecs.getwriter('utf-8') encoded_rtf = writer_factory(raw_rtf) encoded_rtf.write(u"whatever text we want") # use unicode # ...write more text... # flush buffers encoded_rtf.reset() raw_rtf.flush() raw_rtf.write(png.read()) # write from bytes to bytes raw_rtf.close() #END code I have no idea how you'd go about reading the contents of such a file in a sensible way. Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list