🔐 Advanced Binary File Handling — Low-Level Operations

Work with binary data formats, struct packing, and image processing.

🎯 Struct Packing and Unpacking

import struct

# Pack Python values into bytes
packed = struct.pack("i4sh", 100, 3.14, 42)  # int, float, short

# Unpack bytes back to values
unpacked = struct.unpack("i4sh", packed)
print(unpacked)  # (100, 3.14, 42)

# Read binary file with known format
with open("data.bin", "rb") as f:
    for _ in range(1000):
        values = struct.unpack("4i", f.read(16))
        process(values)

💡 Image File Processing

from PIL import Image

# Read image metadata without loading full image
img = Image.open("photo.jpg")
print(img.size)  # Dimensions
print(img.format)  # JPEG

# Process large images in chunks
img = Image.open("huge.tiff")
# Process by tiles instead of loading all

🔑 Key Takeaways

• ✅ struct for binary data formats

• ✅ Efficient low-level file access

• ✅ PIL for image processing

• ✅ Memory-mapped files for large binaries

• ✅ Understand file format specifications

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