On Wed, Sep 8, 2021 at 10:42 PM Victor Stinner <vstinner@python.org> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 8, 2021 at 7:46 AM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
>>> bytes.from_int(121404708502361365413651784, 'little') # should return b'Hello world'
Really? I don't know anyone serializing strings as a "bigint" number. Did you already see such code pattern in the wild? Usually, bytes are serialized as... bytes, no? Sometimes, bytes are serialized as base64 or hexadecimal to go through into an ASCII ("7-bit") bytestream. But I don' recall any file format serializing bytes as a single large decimal number.
I've seen it, in various places. There are certain protocols in which the distinction between a number and a byte sequence is immaterial (for instance, the FOURCC identifier in an IFF family file such as a .wav - the signature 'WAVE' is identically considered to be the number 0x57415645). Being able to convert between the numeric and character forms of the same identifier is convenient. ChrisA