I thought the hell of stripping trailing Ls off of stringed numbers was gone but it appears that the hex() and oct() builtins still leave the trailing 'L' on longs: Python 2.6a0 (trunk:58846M, Nov 4 2007, 15:44:12) [GCC 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu4)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

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x = 0xffffffffc10025be x 18446744072652596670L str(x) '18446744072652596670' hex(x) '0xffffffffc10025beL' '0x%x' % (x) '0xffffffffc10025be' oct(x) '01777777777770100022676L'

This appears to be fixed in py3k (as there is no longer an int/long to distinguish). Can we at least get rid of the annoying L in 2.6? -gps