How do I represent and work with n-bit vectors in Python?

Question

In an assignment I am currently working on we need to work with bit vectors, but I am very unsure of how to do this in Python. They should be able to be from 4 bits to 20 bi

Answer 1

A bit dated but I'm going to leave another stdlib option here just for comparison sake. It is also easy to do this using the ctypes module.

For example:

And is it possible (how?) to express a bit vector of size 20 ? I am thinking of perhaps making a 24 bit / 3 byte vector and ignoring the 4 bits.

class Simple(ctypes.LittleEndianStructure):
    _pack_ = 1
    _fields_ = [
                 ('one', ctypes.c_ubyte, 8),
                 ('two', ctypes.c_ubyte, 8),
                 ('three', ctypes.c_ubyte, 8)
               ]

s = Simple(0, 2, 256)
bytearray(s)        # bytearray(b'\x00\x02\x00')
s = Simple(0, 2, 255)
bytearray(s)        # bytearray(b'\x00\x02\xff')

class Simple(ctypes.BigEndianStructure):
    _pack_ = 1
    _fields_ = [
                 ('one', ctypes.c_ubyte, 8),
                 ('two', ctypes.c_ubyte, 8),
                 ('three', ctypes.c_ubyte, 8)
               ]

s = Simple(0, 2, 256)
bytearray(s)        # bytearray(b'\x00\x02\x00')
s = Simple(0, 2, 255)
bytearray(s)        # bytearray(b'\x00\x02\xff')

s.two |= 3
bytearray(s)        # bytearray(b'\x00\x03\xff')

or something more straight forward like this:

class bit_vector(Structure):
    _fields_ = [('bits', c_uint32, 24),
                ('unused', c_uint32, 8),
                ]

bv = bit_vector()
# turn on the 18th bit -- being explicit just to demo it
bv.bits |= int('000000000000000001000000', 2)
bin(bv.bits)   # 0b1000000