pack an integer into a string

[superpollo]

superpollo wrote:
> Sebastian Bassi wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 7:28 PM, superpollo<user at example.net> wrote:
>>
>>> is there a pythonic and synthetic way (maybe some standard module) to 
>>> "pack"
>>> an integer (maybe a *VERY* big one) into a string? like this:
>>
>>
>>
>> What do you mean to pack? Maybe Pickle is what you want.
>>
>> import cPickle
>> variable = 124348654333577698
>> cPickle.dump(variable,open('filename', 'w'))
>>
>> To load it:
>>
>> import cPickle
>> vaariable = cPickle.load(open('filename'))
>>
>> It is not "into a string", but instead of a filename, use a string 
>> with stringio
> 
> 
> 
>  >>> number
>  252509952
>  >>> f = cStringIO.StringIO()
>  >>> cPickle.dump(number , f)
>  >>> f.getvalue()
>  'I252509952\n.'
>  >>>
> 
> as you can see, the pickled representation is not what i wanted...
> 

OTOH, using a higher protocol:

  >>> cPickle.dump(number , f , 1)
  >>> f.getvalue()
  'J\x00\xff\x0c\x0f.'

which is very close to '\xf0\xcf\xf0\x00', that i meant originally... so 
i i change my spec as; '\x0f\x0c\xff\x00' (i.e. left- intead of right- 
zeropadding) i am almost there...

bye