Best way to convert sequence of bytes to long integer

Peter Otten __peter__ at web.de
Wed Jan 20 03:43:30 EST 2010


Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> I have a byte string (Python 2.x string), e.g.:
> 
> s = "g%$f yg\n1\05"
> assert len(s) == 10
> 
> I wish to convert it to a long integer, treating it as base-256.
> Currently I'm using:
> 
> def makelong(s):
>     n = 0
>     for c in s:
>         n *= 256
>         n += ord(c)
>     return n
> 
> 
> which gives:
> 
>>>> makelong(s)
> 487088900085839492165893L
> 
> 
> Is this the best way, or have I missed some standard library function?

The pickle module uses

>>> import binascii
>>> s = "g%$f yg\n1\05"
>>> long(binascii.hexlify(s), 16)
487088900085839492165893L

Peter



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