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pythonintegerfixed-width
Andrzej Pronobis
Andrzej Pronobis

Reputation: 36096

Fixed width integer types (e.g. uint32) in Python

Certain mathematical operations, especially on data read from hardware drivers, can depend on fixed width of the data type. Example: bitwise shift. What is the Pythonic way of creating integer variables with fixed width (e.g. uint32, int16 etc.) that would overflow/shift accordingly?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 6517

Answers (2)

Steve Barnes
Steve Barnes

Reputation: 28370

For interfacing with hardware we normally use the struct standard library - specifically struct.pack and struct.unpack not only are fixed widths handled but also endianess issues. See the python 2 or python 3 library manuals.

Once you have retrieved your data from your hardware and unpacked it if you are going to be performing any heavy duty mathematics on it you would usually assign it to numpy data types which will:

  1. Provide just about any operation that you could need,
  2. Behave as expected for the data type
  3. If you have lots of data stored in arrays or matrices provide vector methods for handling the data quickly & simply.
import numpy as np
x = np.uint32(42)
print(x << 20)  # 44040192
print(x << 32)  # 180388626432 - Looks like it has been promoted
print(type(x << 32)) # numpy.int64 - it has

So if you are doing something such as reading a set of A-D readings from registers and then performing a lot of maths on them so as to produce a graph, etc. then this is fine but if you are reading a value from one register, doing some math, then writing the results back to a register you need to take care using anything like numpy.

Note that there is also the ctypes library available for interfacing with hardware and DLLs but it will always expect the values to be in "native" format - so, for example, if you are reading a 16 bit number from big endian hardware on a little endian machine then you will get problems.

Upvotes: 4

Cory Kramer
Cory Kramer

Reputation: 117866

I would suggest the fixedint library. The classes in that library are named in the following convention:

[Mutable][U]Int<N>

So for your two examples, the classes would be

#    C++                 Python fixedint
 std::uint32                 UInt32
 std::uint16                 UInt16

This supports things like bit-shifting, etc

>>> a = fixedint.UInt32(14)
>>> a
UInt32(14)
>>> a << 2
UInt32(56)

Upvotes: 3

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