Open .dat and .atr file types with Python

Question

I'm trying to read in .dat and .atr files with Python; from Physionet, these for example. I've tried the standard context manager opening method:

with open("path/to/files/101.dat", "rb") as f:
  for line in f: print f

But I get uninterpretable results like D"D ?C?C?C!?C?C?C?C?C for the lines. These lines should be like 3.0000000e-003 4.9950000e+000 4.3400000e+000 (I know this from published studies with this dataset). Any ideas how I can read in this data?

Answer 1

You can try to open it using numpy

import numpy as np
myarray = np.fromfile("path/to/files/101.dat",dtype=float)

Answer 2

To read a .dat file use the following code-

record = wfdb.rdrecord('../input/apneaecg/apnea-ecg/a01') 
wfdb.plot_wfdb(record, title='Record a01 from Physionet Apnea ECG') 
display(record.__dict__)

You need to have wfdb library installed for that. The p_signal array in the above dictionary contains the ECG values for a01 person.