[Python-Dev] os.urandom API (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Mon Aug 30 05:48:49 CEST 2004

(Quick apology to Tim for accidentally sending this to him only, I recently switched email clients and am still getting used to it)

Note that it's easy (abeit obscure) to generate a long from a string s:

long(binascii.hexlify(s), 16)

or even: long(s.encode('hex'), 16)

It's harder to go in the other direction. First you do hex(n). Then

Perhaps what is needed is a method to easily convert between large integers and strings. It seems as though a new struct conversion code is in order, something that works similarly to the way the 's' code works:

#pack the integer bigint as a signed big-endian packed binary string, #null-filling as necessary, for 64 bytes of precision a = struct.pack('>64g', bigint)

#unpack an unsigned little-endian packed binary string of 24 bytes to a #python long b = struct.unpack('<24G', a)

With such a change, I think many of the string/integer translation complaints would disappear.

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