Question:
How do I get a byte stream that works like StringIO for Python 2.5?
Application:
I'm converting a PDF to text, but don't want to save a file to the hard disk.
Other Thoughts:
I figured I could use StringIO, but there's no mode parameter (I guess "String" implies text mode). 
Apparently the io.BytesIO class is new in v2.6, so that doesn't work for me either.
I've got a solution with the tempfile module, but I'd like to avoid any reads/writes to/from the hard disk.
In Python 2.x, "string" means "bytes", and "unicode" means "string". You should use the StringIO or cStringIO modules. The mode will depend on which kind of data you pass in as the buffer parameter.
BytesIO with python v2.5