Two newbie questions

[Fred Clare]

  1.)  Is there a Python equivalent to the C function "sprintf"?
       That is, I would like to do a formatted print and save
       the result in a Python string.

  2.)  What is an efficient way of packing a large (i.e. > 1MB)
       list of integers (that are in the range 0 to 255)
       into a Python string as a sequence of contiguous bytes?

       Something like the following seems very inefficient:


       import struct

       .
       .
       .
       
       ir = [ ... lots of integers in the range 0 to 255 ... ]
       bytes = ""
       for x in ir:
         bytes = bytes + struct.pack("B",x)


  --Fred Clare

-- 
Fred Clare
fred at ucar.edu