Maximum and Minimum values for ints

Question

I am looking for minimum and maximum values for integers in python. For eg., in Java, we have Integer.MIN_VALUE and Integer.MAX_VALUE. Is there something like this in python?

Answer 1

If you just need a number that's bigger than all others, you can use

float('inf') 

in similar fashion, a number smaller than all others:

float('-inf') 

This works in both python 2 and 3.

Answer 2

Python 3

In Python 3, this question doesn't apply. The plain int type is unbounded.

However, you might actually be looking for information about the current interpreter's word size, which will be the same as the machine's word size in most cases. That information is still available in Python 3 as sys.maxsize, which is the maximum value representable by a signed word. Equivalently, it's the size of the largest possible list or in-memory sequence.

Generally, the maximum value representable by an unsigned word will be sys.maxsize * 2 + 1, and the number of bits in a word will be math.log2(sys.maxsize * 2 + 2). See this answer for more information.

Python 2

In Python 2, the maximum value for plain int values is available as sys.maxint:

>>> sys.maxint 9223372036854775807 

You can calculate the minimum value with -sys.maxint - 1 as shown here.

Python seamlessly switches from plain to long integers once you exceed this value. So most of the time, you won't need to know it.