open a binary file for reading

infile = open('my_file.bin', 'rb')

*be sure to close the file handle when you’re done with it:

infile.close()

read an entire binary file into memory

file = infile.read()

read a byte in a binary file

byte1 = infile.read(1)

put the file pointer at the beginning of the file

infile.seek(0)

get the integer value of binary data stored as ASCII

(Ex: a byte in a particular file is stored as \x05, you need to get the integer 5)

byte = infile.read(1)  # ord can only handle 1 character at a time
ord(byte)

get the integer value of binary data stored as little-endian hex

import struct
struct.unpack('i', data)

Note: the data must be exact according to the type of data; an integer must be 4 bytes long. for more information see: http://docs.python.org/library/struct.html#format-characters