Dumb python questions

[Paul Rubin]

m.faassen at vet.uu.nl (Martijn Faassen) writes:
> > I think I'm reacting not as much to language differences as to
> > differences in system maturity.  Whenever I write something in Perl or
> > CL, and I need to do something like turn an array into a string,
> 
> Do you mean a Python list? ''.join(mylist)

No I mean a list of character values, like (97,98,99) => "abc".

> > somebody seems to have faced that problem before and it's been taken
> > care of in some reasonably thought-out way.  In Python, I often feel
> > like I'm doing something that hasn't been done much before.
> 
> In part I suspect that's due to your inexperience with the language, but
> please keep pointing out the things that are missing. :)

Here's one: say I have a long int, like x = 7**77777L.  How can I tell
how many bits it takes to express that number in binary?  How can I
convert it into a packed character string (i.e. represent it in string
form with 8 bits/char so I can write it to a file)?  The answers I can
think of involve weird kludges and/or are unacceptably slow.

Thanks.