how many bytes in an int

[Grant Edwards]

On 2004-08-09, Reid Nichol <rnichol_rrc at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> I suspect you want to use the "struct" module -- but it's a
>> guess, since you haven't really said what it is you're trying
>> to accomplish.
>
> I'm thinking of writing a movie file encoder (probably avi).
> So, I need to output DWORD (lookup revealed its a 4-byte int)
> to a binary file.  Therefore I need to know whether this can
> be done in python or not, which will tell me whether I'll try
> to do it or not.
>
> But, since the 64-bit archecture is out, short, long, etc may
> change there meanings quite soon.  From what I've read in the
> struct module docs I can only tell it that it's a short, long,
> etc. but not whether it's exactly a 4-byte int.  Is there a
> way to do this?

The struct module is the only thing I know about.  If you're
worried about the "C" types in the struct module changing
underneat you, you could do a pure Python implimentation of
"python-int" to/from DWORD. It's utterly trivial and shouldn't
take more than one or two lines of code.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  LOOK!!! I'm WALKING
                                  at               in my SLEEP again!!
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