Integer to bitfield as a list

Question

I\'ve created a method to convert an int to a bitfield (in a list) and it works, but I\'m sure there is more elegant solution- I\'ve just been staring at it for to

Answer 1

This doesn't use bin:

 b = [n >> i & 1 for i in range(7,-1,-1)]

and this is how to handle any integer this way:

 b = [n >> i & 1 for i in range(n.bit_length() - 1,-1,-1)]

See bit_length.

If you want index 0 of the list to correspond to the lsb of the int, change the range order, i.e.

b = [n >> i & 1 for i in range(0, n.bit_length()-1)]

Note also that using n.bit_length() can be a point of failure if you're trying to represent fixed length binary values. It returns the minimum number of bits to represent n.