I'm doing some work with the windows registry. Depending on whether you're running python as 32-bit or 64-bit, the key value will be different. How do I detect if Python is running as a 64-bit application as opposed to a 32-bit application?
Note: I'm not interested in detecting 32-bit/64-bit Windows - just the Python platform.
import platform
platform.architecture()
From the Python docs:
Queries the given executable (defaults to the Python interpreter binary) for various architecture information.
Returns a tuple (bits, linkage) which contain information about the bit architecture and the linkage format used for the executable. Both values are returned as strings.
While it may work on some platforms, be aware that platform.architecture is not always a reliable way to determine whether python is running in 32-bit or 64-bit. In particular, on OS X multi-architecture builds such as the Apple-supplied default with OS X 10.6, the same executable file may be capable of running in either mode, as the example below demonstrates. The safest multi-platform approach is to test sys.maxint on Python 2.x or sys.maxsize on Python 3.x.
$ /usr/bin/python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul 7 2009, 23:51:51)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import platform, sys
>>> platform.architecture(), sys.maxint
(('64bit', ''), 9223372036854775807)
>>> ^D
$ export VERSIONER_PYTHON_PREFER_32_BIT=yes
$ /usr/bin/python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul 7 2009, 23:51:51)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import platform, sys
>>> platform.architecture(), sys.maxint
(('64bit', ''), 2147483647)
Out of curiousity... Isn't it possible to assume that you're on 32-bit, wrapped in try..except that would then try using the 64-bit key on failure? That's how I'd probably do it.