Question

Python 3 really complicated the whole file reading process, when you have a binary file with some strings in it.

I can do string.decode('ascii') when I’m sure what I read is ascii text, but in my file I have strings with null ('\x00') terminated strings I must read an convert to list of strings.
How would be the new way to do it, without going byte-by-byte and checking if it’s a null or not?

mylist = chunkFromFile.split('\x00')

TypeError: Type str doesn't support the buffer API

Answer 1

I’m guessing that chunkFromFile is a bytes object. Then you also need to provide a bytes argument to the .split() method:

mylist = chunkFromFile.split(b'\x00')

See:

>>> chunkFromFile = bytes((123,45,0,67,89))
>>> chunkFromFile
b'{-\x00CY'
>>> chunkFromFile.split(b'\x00')
[b'{-', b'CY']
>>> chunkFromFile.split('\x00')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: Type str doesn't support the buffer API