Behavior of file.read() in python2 vs python3

Python
#1

I have some code that I translated from python 2 to python 3 (there are no visible differences in my example, but it is changed). Basically, my code reads a binary audio file. The sizes of the same raw audio file are wildly different after they are read and I have no idea why. The main difference is that one of the programs is run in python 3.8 and the older one is 2.7.

Python 3 code:

    def __read_file(self, file):
        try:
            a_dir = os.path.join(TestContext().accuracy_dir,self._accuracy,"Audio") if \
                self._accuracy else TestContext().media_dir
            if "http://" in file:
                f = urllib.request.urlopen(file)
                a_buffer = f.read()
            else:
                if False == os.path.isabs(file):
                    file = os.path.join(a_dir, file)
                with open(file, mode='rb') as f:
                    a_buffer = f.read()

       
        except IOError as e:
            raise IOError('I/O error({0}): {1}'.format(e.errno, e.strerror))

        print("AUDIO BUFFER LENGTH", len(a_buffer))
        return a_buffer

Python 3 result:

AUDIO BUFFER LENGTH: 3977

Python 2 result:

AUDIO BUFFER LENGTH: 122400

My [python](advertisement redacted) 2 code is the exact same except with urllib2 instead of urllib.

Also, the python 2 way is the correct way. My audio file should be that big. I’m not sure why it suddenly smaller.

Any help is appreciated.

#2

Two questions

  1. Under which sets of inputs do you get different outputs than you expected?

  2. Why do you believe that the Python 2 size is correct?

I suspect that the Python 3 version is doing somethings slightly different and you will need to dig into the documentation.