Some protocols communicate data in forms that are less than human-friendly. Unlike XML, some communication protocols as well as older data formats can be downright obtuse. It is not unheard of for some to require the appending of a certain number of signature characters to a particular point of a data packet, usually the beginning or the end. While jobs involving these formats typically include building a parser, if one is not already built, the efficiency with which the packet is parsed inevitably reflects on you. Rather than read the file in toto, it may be worth considering a partial read. To affect this efficiently, use Python's os functions lseek() and read(). To learn how, see "lseek() and ye can read()", the latest segment in the series on the os module.