How to determine 'word' size in Python

Question

I need to know the number of bytes in a \'word\' in Python. The reason I need this is I have the number of words I need to read from a file; if I knew the number of bytes in

Answer 1

How about something like this:

def machine_word_size():
    import sys
    num_bytes = 0
    maxint = sys.maxint
    while maxint > 0:
        maxint = maxint >> 8
        num_bytes += 1
    return num_bytes