How do I extract a ieee-be binary file embedded in a zipfile?

I have a set of zip files which contains several ieee-be encoded binary and text files. I have used Pythons ZipFile module and can extract the contents of the text file

def readPropFile(myZipFile):
    zf = zipfile.ZipFile(myZipFile,'r') # Open zip file for reading
    zFileList=zf.namelist() # extract list of files embedded in _myZipFile_

    # text files in _myZipFile_ contain the word 'properties' so 
    # get a list of the property files here
    for f in zFileList:
        if f.find('properties')>0:
            propFileList.append(f)

    # open first file in propFileList
    pp2 = cStringIO.StringIO(zf.read(propFileList[0])) 
    fileLines = []
    for ll in pp2:
        fileLines.append(ll)

    # return the lines in the property text file
    return fileLines 

Now I would like to do the same sort of thing except reading the data in the binary files and creating an array of floats. So how would I proceed?

Update 1

The format of the binary files is such that in MATLAB I after extracting them to a temporary location I can read them with the following

>>fid=fopen('dataFile.bin'开发者_运维问答,'r','ieee-be');
>>dat=fread(fid,[1 inf],'float');

Update 2

I now have a simple function in attempt to read the binary data something like

def readBinaryFile(myZipFile):
    zFile = zipfile.ZipFile(myZipFile,'r')
    dataFileName = 'dataFile.bin'
    stringData = zFile.read(dataFileName)
    ss=stringData[0:4]
    data=struct.unpack('>f',ss) 

but the value I get does the same as the value reported in MATLAB.

Update 3

first float in my binary file

• HEX value: BD 98 99 3D
• float : -.07451103

Most of what you need is in this answer How do I convert a Python float to a hexadecimal string in python 2.5? Nonworking solution attached

See the stuff about struct.pack.

More details on struct are in the Python docs

You could also try the Numpy extension (here), which is a bit lighter than SciPy. Numpy has lots of I/O routines. For example,

import numpy
f = file ('example.dat')
data_type = numpy.dtype ('float32').newbyteorder ('>')
x = numpy.fromfile (f, dtype=data_type)

gives you a numpy array. There's probably a less-clunky way to specify the data type.

In the snippet from the question, the "properties files" (whatever that is) are detected, in a rather loose fashion, by the presence of the string 'properties' in their contents, when read as text. I don't know what the equivalent of this would be for binary IEEE-le files.

However, with Python, a easy way to read ieee-le (or other formats) files is with SciPy's io.fopen module.

Edit
Since anyway reading such a binary file requires one to know the structure, you can express this in a struct.pack() format as desribed in Michael Dillon's response! This only requires the std library, and is just as easy!