I assign a value to a variable <code>x</code> in the following way: <pre class="prettyprint"><code>import wave w = wave.open('/usr/share/sounds/ekiga/voicemail.wav', 'r') x = w.readframes(1) </code></pre> When I type x I get: <pre class="prettyprint"><code>'\x1e\x00' </code></pre> So <code>x</code> got a value. But what is that? Is it hexadecimal? <code>type(x)</code> and <code>type(x[0])</code> tell me that <code>x</code> and <code>x[0]</code> a strings. Can anybody tell me how should I interpret this strings? Can I transform them into integer?

What is returned by wave.readframes?

I assign a value to a variable x in the following way:

import wave
w = wave.open('/usr/share/sounds/ekiga/voicemail.wav', 'r')
x = w.readframes(1)

When I type x I get:

'\x1e\x00'

So x got a value. But what is that? Is it hexadecimal? type(x) and type(x[0]) tell me that x and x[0] a strings. Can anybody tell me how should I interpret this strings? Can I transform them into integer?

The interactive interpreter echoes unprintable characters like that. The string contains two bytes, 0x1E and 0x00. You can convert it to an integer with struct.unpack("<h", x) (little endian, 2 bytes, signed).