Question

I’m pretty new to python, using python 2.7. I have to read in a binary file, and then concatenate some of the bytes together. So I tried

f = open("filename", "rb")
j=0
infile = []
try:
    byte = f.read(1)
    while byte != "":
        infile.append(byte) 
        byte = f.read(1)
finally:
    f.close()
blerg = (bin(infile[8])<<8 | bin(infile[9]))
print type

where I realize that the recast as binary is probably unnecessary, but this is one of my later attempts.

The error I’m getting is TypeError: ‘str’ object cannot be interpreted as index.
This is news to me, since I’m not using a string anywhere. What the !@#% am I doing wrong?

EDIT: Full traceback
file binaryExtractor.py, line 25, in
blerg = (bin(infile[8])<<8 | bin(infile[9]))
TypeError: ‘str’ object cannot be interpreted as index

Answer 1

You want to use the ord function which returns an integer from a single character string, not bin which returns a string representation of a binary number.