Question

I’m converting a matlab script to numpy, but have some problems with reading data from a binary file. Is there an equivelent to fseek when using fromfile to skip the beginning of the file? This is the type of extractions I need to do:

fid = fopen(fname);
fseek(fid, 8, 'bof');
second = fread(fid, 1, 'schar');
fseek(fid, 100, 'bof');
total_cycles = fread(fid, 1, 'uint32', 0, 'l');
start_cycle = fread(fid, 1, 'uint32', 0, 'l');

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use seek with a file object in the normal way, and then use this file object in fromfile. Here’s a full example:

import numpy as np
import os

data = np.arange(100, dtype=np.int)
data.tofile("temp")  # save the data

f = open("temp", "rb")  # reopen the file
f.seek(256, os.SEEK_SET)  # seek

x = np.fromfile(f, dtype=np.int)  # read the data into numpy
print x 
# [64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88
# 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99]