long <-> str binary conversion

Question

Is there any lib that convert very long numbers to string just copying the data?

These one-liners are too slow:

def xlong(s):
    return sum([ord(c) << e*8 for e,c in enumerate(s)])

def xstr(x):
    return chr(x&255) + xstr(x >> 8) if x else ''

print xlong('abcd'*1024) % 666
print xstr(13**666)

Answer 1

You want the struct module.

packed = struct.pack('l', 123456)
assert struct.unpack('l', packed)[0] == 123456

Answer 2

How about

from binascii import hexlify, unhexlify

def xstr(x):
    hex = '%x' % x
    return unhexlify('0'*(len(hex)%2) + hex)[::-1]

def xlong(s):
    return int(hexlify(s[::-1]), 16)

I didn't time it but it should be faster and also work on larger numbers, since it doesn't use recursion.

Answer 3

In fact, I have a lack of long(s,256) . I lurk more and see that there are 2 function in Python CAPI file "longobject.h":

PyObject * _PyLong_FromByteArray( const unsigned char* bytes, size_t n, int little_endian, int is_signed);
int _PyLong_AsByteArray(PyLongObject* v, unsigned char* bytes, size_t n, int little_endian, int is_signed);

They do the job. I don't know why there are not included in some python module, or correct me if I'am wrong.

Answer 4

If you need fast serialization use marshal module. It's around 400x faster than your methods.

Answer 5

I'm guessing you don't care about the string format, you just want a serialization? If so, why not use Python's built-in serializer, the cPickle module? The dumps function will convert any python object including a long integer to a string, and the loads function is its inverse. If you're doing this for saving out to a file, check out the dump and load functions, too.

>>> import cPickle
>>> print cPickle.loads(cPickle.dumps(13**666)) % 666
73
>>> print (13**666) % 666
73

Answer 6

Performance of cPickle vs. marshal (Python 2.5.2, Windows):

python -mtimeit -s"from cPickle import loads,dumps;d=13**666" "loads(dumps(d))"
1000 loops, best of 3: 600 usec per loop

python -mtimeit -s"from marshal import loads,dumps;d=13**666" "loads(dumps(d))"
100000 loops, best of 3: 7.79 usec per loop

python -mtimeit -s"from pickle import loads,dumps;d= 13**666" "loads(dumps(d))"
1000 loops, best of 3: 644 usec per loop

marshal is much faster.