Python Bitstream implementations

Question

I am writing a huffman implementation in Python as a learning exercise. I have got to the point of writing out my variable length huffman codes to a buffer (or file). Only

Answer 1

No, as far as I know there's nothing in the standard library that helps you with bit-aligned operations. Python is not designed to fiddle with the small stuff ^^...

But you could easily write your own bitstream-writer with the help of byte arrays:

>>> from array import array
>>> a = array("B")
>>> a.append(1) # 128
>>> a.append(0)
>>> a.append(0)
>>> a.append(0)
>>> a.append(1) # 8
>>> a.append(1) # 4
>>> a.append(1) # 2
>>> a.append(1) # 1
>>> print reduce(lambda m, n: (m << 1) + n, a, 0)
143

You get the idea...