A struct for 2.4 that supports float's inf and nan?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2007-09-20, Joshua J. Kugler <joshua at eeinternet.com> wrote:

>> import struct
>> 
>> pack_double_workaround = {
>>   'inf': struct.pack('Q', 0x7ff0000000000000L),
>>   '-inf': struct.pack('Q', 0xfff0000000000000L),
>>   'nan': struct.pack('Q', 0x7ff8000000000000L)
>> }
>> 
>> def pack_one_safe(f, a):
>>   if f == 'd' and str(f) in pack_double_workaround:
>>       return pack_double_workaround[str(f)]
>>   return struct.pack(f, a)
>>
>> def pack(fmt, *args):
>>   return ''.join(pack_one_safe(f, a) for f, a in zip(fmt, args))

NB: the strings returned by str() when passed a NaN or Inf are
system dependent and aren't guaranteed to be consistent from
one day to the next unless you've overridden the floating point
object's __repr__ method to make sure.
    
>> Unpacking is similar: unpack doubles with 'Q' and test the
>> long for equality with +-inf, and find nan's by checking bits
>> 52 to 62. If the number's ok, unpack again using 'd'.

Here are the tests I use for 32-bit work:

def isNaN(u):
    return ((u & 0x7f800000) == 0x7f800000) and (u & 0x7fffff)
def isInf(u):
    return ((u & 0x7f800000) == 0x7f800000) and ((u & 0x7fffff)==0)
def isNeg(u):
    return (u & 0x80000000)

>> You can get python values for nan, -inf and inf by using
>> float('nan'), float('-inf'), float('inf').
>> 
>> I've not been able to properly test this, as struct seems
>> to work fine in Python 2.3 and 2.4 on MacOS X.
>
> Thanks for the ideas, Paul!  I came up with something that
> works for me, but this has a few ideas that I'm going to
> implement in my wrapper to make for cleaner code.
>
> As to testing it on MacOS X: yeah, it can be a somewhat
> system-dependent problem,

It shouldn't be, but unfortunately it is.  If you're careful,
you can come up with something that's fairly portable (I've got
a wrapped pickle/unpickle that's nan/inf aware and works on
both Win32 and Linux.  Holler if you want it.

> Thanks for the tips!


-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  I Know A Joke!!
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