Writing bitfields with varying field lengths

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Grumfish wrote:

> In order to familiarize my self with Flash files and their bytecode 
> I've started to make an assembler. My first problem is writing the 
> bitfields the format uses often. It is a series of fields, each can be 
> a different number of bits, combined into the least amount of bytes 
> possible. Extra bits in the last byte are padded with zeros. I would 
> like to make a function that takes a size and value for each field 
> needed, calculate the amount of needed bytes, place the values, and 
> the nretun a binary string of the resulting bitfield. I am at a 
> complete loss on how to place the values into the field. I've Googled 
> but have found nothing helpful. Can anybody help?

This should help you get started.  There are more efficient ways to do 
the work, but this is easily followed (hopefully):

def packBitField( * items ):
    """Pack any size set of boolean values into binary string"""
    result = []
    items = list(items)
    while len(items)>=8:
        result.append( pack8( items[:8] ) )
        del items[:8]
    if items:
        result.append( pack8( items+([0]*(8-len(items)) ) ))
    return "".join( result )

def pack8( items ):
    """Pack 8 booleans into a byte"""
    value = 0
    for x in range(len(items)):
        value += (not not items[x])<<x
    return chr(value)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print repr(packBitField( 0 ))
    print repr(packBitField( 1 ))
    print repr(packBitField( 0,1 ))
    print repr(packBitField( 1,1 ))
    print repr(packBitField( 0,0,1 ))
    print repr(packBitField( 1,0,1 ))
    print repr(packBitField( 0,1,1 ))
    print repr(packBitField( 1,1,1 ))
    print repr(packBitField( 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1 ))

Enjoy,
Mike

_______________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://members.rogers.com/mcfletch/