Am 13.08.2014 15:32, schrieb Steven D'Aprano:
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:


I like to compute log base 2 of a fairly large integer n but
with math.log(n,2) I got:

OverflowError: long int too large to convert to float.

Is there any feasible work-around for that?

If you want the integer log2, that is, the floor of log2, the simplest way
is calculate it like this:

def log2(n):
     """Return the floor of log2(n)."""
     if n <= 0: raise ValueError
     i = -1
     while n:
         n //= 2
         i += 1
     return i

log2(511)
=> returns 8
log2(512)
=> returns 9
log2(513)
=> returns 9


Does that help?

That is too inaccurate (e.g. for 513 above) for me, I would like
to get accuracy around 0.01 and that for very large n.

M. K. Shen

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