Tue, 18 Mar 2008

Snakes! Snakes!

Some days...
I wasted an hour or two today chasing what turned out to be a bug in Python. For a few reasons (lazyness mostly) we're still using Python 2.2 at work. I'd been having fun writing a test script (well, fun...) where I needed to do endianness conversion. Python thoughtfully provides access to the usual ntoh/hton functions, so that's what I used.

        import socket
        aNumber = 0xFFFFFFFF
        print socket.ntohl(aNumber)
    

See, really easy.
Except it doesn't work, at least not in Python 2.2. As it turns out Python insists on interpreting 'aNumber' as a singled long, which causes it to throw an OverflowError whenever you input (or end up) with something that has the MSB set.

As I couldn't easily upgrade Python I worked around it. I hope no children read this as this could scar them for life.

        import socket

        def myntohl(input):
            if input & 0x80000000:
                input = input & 0x7FFFFFFF
                input = socket.ntohl(input)
                input = input | 0x80
            else:
                input = socket.ntohl(input)

            return input
    

Don't worry, it's fixed from 2.3 onwards.

posted at: 21:34 | path: / | [ 0 comments ]


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