On 31 Aug 2009, at 15:00 , Nick Coghlan wrote: Yuvgoog Greenle wrote:
I believe int(s, base) needs an inverse function to allow string representation with different bases. An example use case is 'hashing' a counter like video ID's on youtube, you could use a regular int internally and publish a shorter base-62 id for links.
This subject was discussed 2.5 years ago: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-January/059789.html
I opened a feature request ticket: http://bugs.python.org/issue6783
Some of the questions that remain: 1. Whether this should be a method for int or a regular function in a standard library module like math. 2. What should the method/function be called? (base_convert, radix, etc)
What do you guys think?
This has been coming up for years and always gets bogged down in a spelling argument (a method on int, a function in the math module and an update to the str.format mini language would be the current contenders).
However, most of the actual real use cases for bases between 2 and 36 were dealt with by the addition of binary and octal output to string formatting so the impetus to do anything about it is now a lot lower.
As far as bases between 37 and 62 go, that would involve first getting agreement on extending int() to handle those bases by allowing case sensitive digit parsing. Presumably that would use string lexical ordering so that int('a', 37) > int('A', 37) and int('b', 37) would raise an exception.
That would only be intuitive to someone that knows how ASCII based alphanumeric ordering works though. Or it could be handled via a translation table (needed both ways of course) mapping n indexes to n characters (with n the base you're working with), defaulting to something sane.
Though I'm not sure this is of much interest really: even Erlang (which provides pretty good base conversion tools: it supports literal integers of any base between 2 and 36) doesn't natively support bases beyond 36. A library would probably be better for those more conflictual (or less intuitive) ranges.