How to output list of floats to a binary file in Python

Alex is absolutely right, it’s more efficient to do it this way:

from array import array
output_file = open('file', 'wb')
float_array = array('d', [3.14, 2.7, 0.0, -1.0, 1.1])
float_array.tofile(output_file)
output_file.close()

And then read the array like that:

input_file = open('file', 'rb')
float_array = array('d')
float_array.fromstring(input_file.read())

array.array objects also have a .fromfile method which can be used for reading the file, if you know the count of items in advance (e.g. from the file size, or some other mechanism)