How to check the size of a float in python?

Question

I want to check whether a float is actually 32 or 64bits (and the number of bits of a numpy float array). There should be a built-in, but just didn\'t find out...

Answer 1

Properties of a Python float can be requested via sys.float_info. It returns information such as max/min value, max/min exp value, etc. These properties can potentially be used to calculate the byte size of a float. I never encountered anything else than 64 bit, though, on many different architectures.

The items of a NumPy array might have different size, but you can check their size in bytes by a.itemsize, where a is a NumPy array.