Unable to bit shift and logical OR bytes and ints?

[deanhystad]

Nice thing about struct.pack and unpack is it is very easy to fix bytesex problems and you can read/write arrays and structures.

Since struct is the common way to communicate with C/C++ it is going to be around as long as Python. And it is well documented.

As for readability, the shift code reads easier than this?

def header_address(filename):
    '''Return unsigned int value starting at byte 36 in the file header'''
    with open(filename, "rb") as file:
        file.seek(36, 0)
        return struct.unpack('>I', file.read(4))