How to read a compressed binary file as an array of floats

Question

I need to read a compressed unformatted binary file in as an array of floats. The only way that I have found to do this, is to use os to unzip, read it using np.fromfile, and then zip it up again.

os.system('gunzip filename.gz')
array = np.fromfile('filename','f4')
os.system('gzip filename')

However, this is not acceptable. Apart from being messy, I need to read files when I don't have write permission. I understand that np.fromfile can not directly read a compressed file. I have found people recommending that I use this:

f=gzip.GzipFile('filename')
file_content = f.read()

But this returns something like this: '\x00\x80\xe69\x00\x80\xd19\x00\x80' instead of an array of floats. Does anyone know how to convert this output into an array of floats, or have a better way to do this?

mgilson · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-27 22:47:11Z

4

After you've read the file content, you should be able to get an array using numpy.fromstring:

import gzip
import numpy as np

f=gzip.GzipFile('filename')
file_content = f.read()
array = np.fromstring(file_content, dtype='f4')

answered Jun 27, 2016 at 22:47

mgilson

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