I have a binary file with some text on it. To search for it I'd write, in good old bash:
grep -a 'pattern' binaryfile
I'd like to achieve the same in Python using the re module. The reason is that I want my script to work on multiple platforms.
After reading a bit around I wrote a small grep function, and it looks like this:
import re
def grep(pattern, binaryfile):
regexobj = re.compile(pattern)
for line in binaryfile:
if regexobj.search(line):
yield line
The code works fine on normal text files.
with open('pythoncode.py','r') as f:
print(list(grep('import', f)))
But if I try it on a binary file with open(binaryfile, 'rb'), then it throws the following error:
TypeError: cannot use a string pattern on a bytes-like object
Before I start to dig into all sorts of ad-hoc solutions to my problem...
Is there a simple Pythonic way to use the re module to search for patterns in binary files?
