Reading a raw binary data in python and converting it into ascii

Question

I have a raw binary data and I want to convert it into a readable text.

the text contains with something that is not readable, it has also special characters, like black box with NUL word or " N–[«´N–[« )› )ÿ " . I'm just new in python.

here's my code

import struct
file = open('rawbinary.txt')
text = file.read()
struct.unpack("iiiii", text[:20])

my output was:

(2113933569, 67305475, -80477197, 1536577129, 1312228259)

and if add this:

text[:10]

my output is

'\x01\x11\x00~\x03\x00\x03\x04\xf3\x03'

Am I doing it right? What is my next step?

Solution

Use the built-in ord function.

with open("/bin/ls", "rb") as fin:
  buf = fin.read()
bytes = map(ord, buf)    
print bytes[:10]

output:

[127, 69, 76, 70, 2, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0]