Read stdin as binary

python stdin

BeMy Friend · Aug 29, 2015 · Viewed 22.4k times · Source

I have code that opens and reads a file from binary.

with open (file, mode="rb") as myfile:
    message_string=myfile.read()
    myfile.close

I now need to do the same thing reading from stdin. But I can't figure out how to read binary.

The error says byte strings only.
Any suggestions?

Answer

In Python 3, if you want to read binary data from stdin, you need to use its buffer attribute:

import sys

data = sys.stdin.buffer.read()

On Python 2, sys.stdin.read() already returns a byte string; there is no need to use buffer.