Python how to write to a binary file?

I have a list of bytes as integers, which is something like

[120, 3, 255, 0, 100]

How can I write this list to a file as binary?

Would this work?

newFileBytes = [123, 3, 255, 0, 100]
# make file
newFile = open("filename.txt", "wb")
# write to file
newFile.write(newFileBytes)

This is exactly what bytearray is for:

newFileByteArray = bytearray(newFileBytes)
newFile.write(newFileByteArray)

If you're using Python 3.x, you can use bytes instead (and probably ought to, as it signals your intention better). But in Python 2.x, that won't work, because bytes is just an alias for str. As usual, showing with the interactive interpreter is easier than explaining with text, so let me just do that.

Python 3.x:

>>> bytearray(newFileBytes)
bytearray(b'{\x03\xff\x00d')
>>> bytes(newFileBytes)
b'{\x03\xff\x00d'

Python 2.x:

>>> bytearray(newFileBytes)
bytearray(b'{\x03\xff\x00d')
>>> bytes(newFileBytes)
'[123, 3, 255, 0, 100]'

Use struct.pack to convert the integer values into binary bytes, then write the bytes. E.g.

newFile.write(struct.pack('5B', *newFileBytes))

However I would never give a binary file a .txt extension.

The benefit of this method is that it works for other types as well, for example if any of the values were greater than 255 you could use '5i' for the format instead to get full 32-bit integers.