On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 11:45 AM, Paulo da Silva <p_s_d_a_s_i_l_v_a...@netcabo.pt> wrote: > Hi! > > What is the best way to read a file that begins with some few text lines > and whose rest is a binary stream? > > As an exmaple ... files .pnm. > > Thanks for any comments/help on this.
Read the entire file in binary mode, and figure out which parts are text and how they're encoded (possibly ASCII or UTF-8). Then take just those snippets, and decode them. Something like this: data = open("some_file", "rb") text_part = data[2718:3142] decoded_text = text_part.decode("utf-8") That'll give you a usable Unicode string, assuming you have your offsets and encoding correct. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list