BitString error on Windows XP?

Question

Scott, I'd like to thank you for your BitString program. I am working on interpreting data from a neutron detector, and I've found that this module is just the tool I need. Unfortunately, I have yet to get the module to successfully pass test-bitstring.py. I'm running Windows XP and Python 3.1. I've downloaded your file bitstring-0.4.1.zip from your website and extracted both bitstring.py and test-bitstring.py into the \lib folder of my Python directory. Upon running test-bitstring.py, I get 11 errors. :(

I've triple-checked that I have downloaded the correct version, and that both of the .py files successfully made it to me \lib folder. Is there a known complication using Windows with BitString? It is probably something I am doing, but I'm at a loss as to where to go from here. In your documentation, you explicitly say to contact you if the version is correct and the errors persist. I'm fairly certain that I'm missing something obvious, but I wanted to check that this is not some sort of compatibility issue?

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Sorry to bother you, as I'm sure you get questions about this quite a lot. If you get the chance at all to get back to me, I'm very interested in why you think it might fail the test. Thanks again!

Answer 1

I just tested that bitstring-0.4.1 's test-bitstring.py works flawlessly on both Python 3.0 and Python 3.1, on a Windows XP host.

The 3.1 version, specifically, this is what happens.

'3.1.1 (r311:74483, Aug 17 2009, 17:02:12) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)]'

c:\python31\python test_bitstring.py
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 212 tests in 0.297s

OK

OP should provide more details, in particular the list of the 11 failed tests (or at least a few of them, as they probably fail for similar reasons.

Answer 2

Hi Paul, feel free to email me queries like this (that's what I meant when I said contact me in the documentation) - I'm somewhat surprised to find a direct question to me on S.O., but I just happened to see it!

You should update to the latest version for Python 3 (1.0.1). I think the problem was a strange platform dependent issue with struct.unpack that was fixed in rev. 445.