String to Hex

[Michael Foord]

Peter Otten <__peter__ at web.de> wrote in message news:<clnvjg$36k$01$1 at news.t-online.com>...
> Michael Foord wrote:
> 
> > How do you safely turn an arbitrarily long signed hex string into a
> > long integer ?
> > e.g. -0x55aff8080000
> > 
> > When treating them as hex literals I'm getting future warnings that
> > from 2.4 hex values greater than sys.maxint will always return
> > positive values. I've had to treat them as strings and write a
> > function to turn them into longs a character at a time ! I couldn't
> > find a built in function that would do this for me.
> 
> One (fragile) way to avoid that Python 2.3 interprets
> 0x80000000...0xffffffff (on 32-bit systems) as negative integers is to add
> an explicit sign:
> 


Looks good. Why is it fragile ?

Regards,

Fuzzy
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html
> $ python -c"print int('0xffffffff', 0)"
> -c:1: FutureWarning: int('0...', 0): sign will change in Python 2.4
> -1
> $ python -c"print int('+0xffffffff', 0)"
> 4294967295
> $ python -c"print int('-0xffffffff', 0)"
> -4294967295
> 
> Peter