On Sep 8, 5:05 am, Praveena P <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi folks, > > I am new to Python... so am not too sure about how the type conversion > works. > > I have to read a file that contains hexadecimal data and use the data > further to do some arithmetic calculations. > A sample of the input is : 00000000000020E0000032F800000000400022005E > The problem I am facing is this: > I am using f.read(2) to read a byte at a time, but the data that is > read is a string rather than a number. So it kind of hampers any > arithmetic operations I perform on this data... > > Could you please suggest some method I could use for this? > > Thanks guys! > Praveena
check out the "struct" module in the standard python library. It's title says it all "Interpreting strings as packed binary data". I used this extensively to reverse engineer a couple proprietary file structures. You can read large chucks of the file - perhaps a record ? - and then based on the format provided, convert it to a tuple. Good luck. g. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list