[Tutor] How to check the word size of the platform(OS)?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 06:32:31PM +0530, Varuna Seneviratna wrote:
> What is the way to check the word size of the platform(OS), and also int
> size and character size, are they the same. I searched on line But couldn't
> get an answer

You can get some platform details from the platform module:

https://docs.python.org/2/library/platform.html

but why do you need these details? Python is a high-level 
object-oriented language, not a low-level language like C, and native 
machine types aren't very often relevant. For example, Python ints are 
not the same as native ints, they are "Big Num" objects of unlimited 
size:

py> sys.getsizeof(23)  # returns number of bytes used
12
py> sys.getsizeof(2**30000)
4014


Just about the only things I can think of where I might want to know 
these sorts of low-level platform details can be handled by the struct 
module:

https://docs.python.org/2/library/struct.html

If you explain what you want to do in more detail, perhaps we can help 
with a better answer.


-- 
Steven