Mixing read() and write() on Python files in Windows

Python’s file operation should follow the libc convention as internally its implemented using C file IO functions.

Quoting from fopen man page or fopen page in cplusplus

For files open for appending (those which include a “+” sign), on
which both input and output operations are allowed, the stream should
be flushed (fflush) or repositioned (fseek, fsetpos, rewind) between
either a writing operation followed by a reading operation or a
reading operation which did not reach the end-of-file followed by a
writing operation.

SO to summarize, if you need to read a file after writing, you need to fflush the buffer and a write operation after read should be preceded by a fseek, as fd.seek(0, os.SEEK_CUR)

So just change your code snippet to

with open("test1.txt", "r+b") as fd:
    print fd.read(4)
    fd.seek(0, os.SEEK_CUR)
    fd.write("----")

The behavior is consistent with how a similar C program would behave

#include <cstdio>
int main()
{   
    char  buffer[5] = {0};
    FILE *fp = fopen("D:\\Temp\\test1.txt","rb+");
    fread(buffer, sizeof(char), 4, fp);
    printf("%s\n", buffer);
    /*without fseek, file would not be updated*/
    fseek(fp, 0, SEEK_CUR); 
    fwrite("----",sizeof(char), 4, fp);
    fclose(fp);
    return 0;
}