Matthias Gallé: >the int that can replace a sublist can be > 255,<
You didn't specify your integer ranges. Probably there are many other solutions for your problem, but you have to give more information. Like the typical array size, typical range of the numbers, how much important is total memory used, how much important is running speed, what kind of processing (or serialization/ output) you later have to do with such arrays, and so on. Other solutions include using an array('H', []), and using 0-255 to represent ASCII and numbers >255 <2^16 to represent the other numbers, etc. If speed is critical you can even think about creating a little function with PyInline or D+Pyd, etc. Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list