[Tutor] Iterate over letters in a word  Steve Nelson sanelson at
gmail.com Tue Mar 14 22:08:04 CET 2006  On 3/14/06, Steve Nelson
<sanelson at gmail.com> wrote: > On 3/14/06, Danny Yoo <dyoo at
hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote: > > The idea is to unpack four
single characters as a single 4-byte integer. > That's really
useful, thanks, as I was planning to iterate over each > letter
and call ord()  Ok, so experimenting a little further, and
looking at the documentation, it seems that len(string) and
calcsize (i) must be the same.  Is there a reason why 'i' is a 4
byte integer?  Doesn't this mean that this method wouldn't scale
if I then decided I wanted to use, eg, a 6 byte key instead of a
four?  Or do I misunderstand?  I am also struggling to
understand why a 4 byte integer is so large?  >>> mystring =
"Hello I am Steve" >>> import struct >>> struct.unpack('i',
mystring[0:4])  I can see that the largest number I can generate
in a 1 byte integer is 255 - which is (2^8)-1.  Is the point
that with a 4 byte number I