Recently at work I came across a file created in Java that consisted of primitive Java values that had been saved using Javas DataOutputStream. I wanted to read the file using Python but couldn’t find any existing library for this, so I wrote a simple library for reading and writing to a binary format that is compatible with Javas DataOutputStream and DataInputStream.

It is very simple but supports most of the operations for reading and writing to a Java stream, hopefully it can be of some use if someone should need to read or write Java compatible streams.

You use it in almost the identical way as the Java library, but the methods have more “Pythonic” names.

with open('/tmp/stream', 'wb') as f: dos = DataOutputStream(f) dos.write_int(12345) dos.write_utf('hello world') with open('/tmp/stream', 'rb') as f: dis = DataInputStream(f) val = dis.read_int() string = dis.read_utf()

If you are planning on using it for something important I would recommend that you do some more testing and verification that it works, unittest exists but it does not cover all situations and there is no exception handling..

The complete code can be found here.