On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:27:34 +0100, Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
> * Mark Dickinson:
>> On Jan 20, 7:36 am, Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-
>> cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>>> I have a byte string (Python 2.x string), e.g.:
>>>
>>> s = "g%$f yg\n1\05"
>>> assert len(s) == 10
>>>
>>> I wish to convert it to a long integer, treating it as base-256.
>>
>> By the way, are you willing to divulge what you're using this
>> functionality for? When trying to hack out the API for int.to_bytes
>> and int.from_bytes on the mailing list and bug tracker, some of the
>> discussion about use-cases seemed a little too much like guesswork; I'd
>> be curious to find out about real-life use-cases.
>
> One possibility is that Steven wants to apply bitlevel and/or arithmetic
> operations for e.g. some custom cryptographic thing. The string that he
> uses as example is not completely unlike a message digest.
Good guess!
I'm writing a module that handles, I won't call it encryption,
obfuscation using classical cryptographic algorithms. One of the
functions needs a deterministic but unpredictable integer generated from
a human-generated password or passphrase, so I'm using:
hashlib.md5(key).digest()
to get a string of bytes, then converting it to an int.
int.from_bytes would be perfect for me, but in the meantime I'm using
Paul Rubin's trick of int(s.encode("hex"), 16).
Thanks to all who responded.
--
Steven
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