[Python-Dev] Packing and unpacking integers (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson josiah.carlson at gmail.com
Sun Jul 6 03:52:26 CEST 2008

A few years ago (yes, it's been that long), I proposed adding a new format code to struct that would pack integers as strings, similar to the 's' format code. In particular, struct.pack('>60G', v) would be a 60-byte big-endian unsigned integer as a string. The feature request is http://bugs.python.org/issue1023290 .

Shortly thereafter, it was decided that it wouldn't become a struct format code, but instead would find itself as part of binhex. Raymond Hettinger was supposed to write the function a couple years ago for, I believe, Python 2.4 . It never happened. It still hasn't happened for Python 2.5 or 2.6 .

I believe there is still a need for packing integers as strings and unpacking strings as integers, more specifically, offering to Python an interface to _PyLong_FromByteArray() and _PyLong_AsByteArray(). I would be happy to write the functionality and unittests this coming week for 2.6 and 3.0 if I get the ok. If not, I can write it for 2.7 and 3.1 .

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