How do you represent the minimum and maximum values for integers in Python, akin to Integer.MIN_VALUE and Integer.MAX_VALUE in Java?

General Discussions
#1

How do you represent the minimum and maximum values for integers in Python, akin to Integer.MIN_VALUE and Integer.MAX_VALUE in Java?

#2

In Python 3, the concept of minimum and maximum values for integers doesn’t apply, as the plain int type is unbounded. However, if you’re interested in the maximum value representable by a signed word, you can use sys.maxsize, which is equivalent to the size of the largest possible list or in-memory sequence.

For Python 2, the maximum value for plain int values can be accessed using sys.maxint. You can calculate the minimum value as -sys.maxint - 1. Python automatically switches from plain to long integers once you exceed sys.maxint, so in most cases, you won’t need to explicitly deal with these bounds.

#3

In Python 3, the int type is unbounded, meaning there is no maximum or minimum value like in Java.

However, you can use sys.maxsize to get the maximum value a variable of type Py_ssize_t can take. This value is typically 231 - 1 on a 32-bit platform and 263 - 1 on a 64-bit platform. You can use it like this:

import sys
max_size = sys.maxsize
min_size = -sys.maxsize - 1
#4

In Python 3, the sys.maxint constant from Python 2 was removed because there is no longer a limit to the value of integers. Instead, you can use sys.maxsize, which represents an integer larger than any practical list or string index. Here’s how you can use it:

import sys
max_size = sys.maxsize
min_size = -sys.maxsize - 1