How to figure out if the platform is 32bit or 64bit?

[Tim Golden]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> Ken Hartling wrote:
> 
>  > Thanks .. but I want to find out if the system is "running on 64bit"
>  > even when the interpreter is a 32-bit build executable ("what python
>  > was built on").  platform.architecture() and platform() in general
>  > seems to only be looking at the build executable
> 
> You can pass in an arbitrary binary to architecture(), so I guess you 
> could use this on some suitable thing under "/bin" on a Unix box.  This 
> doesn't work on Windows, though.
> 
> In this message,
> 
>     http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-June/326158.html
> 
> Thomas Heller suggests using ctypes to call the Windows API directly; so 
> something like this could work:
> 
>  >>> import ctypes, sys
>  >>> i = ctypes.c_int()
>  >>> kernel32 = ctypes.windll.kernel32
>  >>> process = kernel32.GetCurrentProcess()
>  >>> kernel32.IsWow64Process(process, ctypes.byref(i))
> 1
>  >>> is64bit = (i.value != 0)
>  >>> is64bit
> False

This is included in the latest pywin32-211 as well:

<code>
import win32process
print win32process.IsWow64Process ()

</code>

TJG