How do I decode an image/pdf file properly in python3

Question

I'm sending a file as follows.

with open(file,'rb') as f:
    rh=f.read()

Now to send it I'm using

sock.sendto(rh, (ip,port))

While receiving I'm trying to decode this as follows.

dat = sock.recvfrom()
data=dat.decode('ascii')

Then I'm writing this to a file. This works perfectly fine in case of a text file. But If I'm sending and receiving a image/pdf file, I get this error ..

File "code.py", line 16, in <module>
    data=dat.decode('ascii')
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x89 in position 41: ordinal not in range(128)

I'm not able to find out what's the problem here. I have also used dat.decode('utf-8') but no use

Answer 1

Try opening the file using codecs .

import codecs

f = codecs.open(filepath, encoding="ISO8859-1")

Worked for me when I was uploading a PDF file using an API.

Answer 2

There's no need to decode. You read and sent the file in binary mode, so write the received file in binary mode. encode / decode is meant for translating Unicode text to and from a binary representation.

with open(output_filename,'wb') as f:
    f.write(data)