Reading 32 bit signed ieee 754 floating points from a binary file with python?

Question

I have a binary file which is simple a list of signed 32 bit ieee754 floating point numbers. They are not separated by anything, and simply appear one after another until EOF.

How would I read from this file and interpret them correctly as floating point numbers?

I tried using read(4), but it automatically converts them to a string with ascii encoding.

I also tried using bytearray but that only takes it in 1 byte at a time instead of 4 bytes at a time as I need.

Answer 1

struct.unpack('f', file.read(4))

You can also unpack several at once, which will be faster:

struct.unpack('f'*n, file.read(4*n))

Answer 2

Take a peek at struct.unpack. Something like the following might work...

f = struct.unpack('f', data_read)

Answer 3

import struct
(num,) = struct.unpack('f', f.read(4))