Efficient Bit addressing in Python.

[Tino Wildenhain]

Hi,

Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:
> Is there a canonical way to address the bits in a structure
> like an array or string or struct?
> 
> Or alternatively, is there a good way to combine eight
> ints that represent bits into one of the bytes in some
> array or string or whatever?
> 
> It seems to me that there is a dilemma here :
> 
> if you can write:
> 
> bit3 = 1
> 
> Then you have to jump through hoops to get
> bit0 through bit7 into some byte that you can send
> to an i/o routine.
> 
> On the other hand, if you keep the bits "in" the 
> byte, then you can write:
> 
> byte[3] = '\x7e'
> 
> but you have to jump through hoops to get at 
> the individual bits.
> 
> Is there a "best" way?
> 
> It would be nice to be able to write:
> 
> if io.byte2.bit3:
>    do_something()
> 
> if io.byte2 == alarm_value:
>   do_something_else()
> 
> where:
> 
>  io.byte2 & 8   "is"  io.byte2.bit3

byte1 byte2? this does not look very practical
to me. In the simplest form of storing
your values in a text string, you could just
use ord() to get the byte value and
operate on it with 1<<0 1<<1 1<<3 and so on.

If you want, put a module in which defines the
constants

bit1=1<<0
bit2=1<<1

and so on and use it via
if byte & bit1: ...

more efficiently for operations on really big
bit strings is probably just using integers.

HTH
Tino


> Is this possible?
> 
> - Hendrik
> 
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

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