what is better way of getting windows version in python?

Question

I am going to write a program that performs Windows OS version check, since I can do it with sys.windowsversion()[0] or with platform module that returns string not int what

Answer 1

You can do it by calling sys.getwindowsversion. For example this output:

>>> sys.getwindowsversion()
sys.getwindowsversion(major=6, minor=1, build=7601, platform=2, service_pack='Service Pack 1')

is for Windows 7.

Source: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/2003-November/026227.html

Answer 2

The usual way to do this in C is via _WIN32_WINNT macro, whose values are documented here. sys.getwindowsversion() can indirectly be used to determine _WIN32_WINNT as it exposes all the necessary bits.

import sys

WIN_10 = (10, 0, 0)
WIN_8 = (6, 2, 0)
WIN_7 = (6, 1, 0)
WIN_SERVER_2008 = (6, 0, 1)
WIN_VISTA_SP1 = (6, 0, 1)
WIN_VISTA = (6, 0, 0)
WIN_SERVER_2003_SP2 = (5, 2, 2)
WIN_SERVER_2003_SP1 = (5, 2, 1)
WIN_SERVER_2003 = (5, 2, 0)
WIN_XP_SP3 = (5, 1, 3)
WIN_XP_SP2 = (5, 1, 2)
WIN_XP_SP1 = (5, 1, 1)
WIN_XP = (5, 1, 0)

def get_winver():
    wv = sys.getwindowsversion()
    if hasattr(wv, 'service_pack_major'):  # python >= 2.7
        sp = wv.service_pack_major or 0
    else:
        import re
        r = re.search("\s\d$", wv.service_pack)
        sp = int(r.group(0)) if r else 0
    return (wv.major, wv.minor, sp)

Usage:

if get_winver() >= WIN_XP_SP3:
     ...