[Tutor] HD/DVD/CD

[Terry Carroll]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2006, Kent Johnson wrote:

> To get the desired representation, you have to find a way to make Python 
> interpret the number as an unsigned integer. One way to do this is to 
> convert it to a long integer, then mask off the sign bits:
>   >>> i = long(-1972144115) & 0xFFFFFFFF

Ah, thanks.  I've never had a need to to bit manipulation in Python (or in
anything since IBM S/390 assembler, for that matter), so this is terra
incognito to me. That feels much cleaner to me than using an arithmetic
addition; and is has the advantages of being shorter and addressing both
positive and negative numbers with the same operation, rather than using
the if.

So, changing my previous code, I now like the short and sweet:

>>> import win32api
>>> CD_Info = win32api.GetVolumeInformation("D:/")
>>> serno = "%X" % (long(CD_Info[1]) & 0xFFFFFFFF)
>>> serno
'8A73780D'