Signed decimal from a signed hex short in python

Question

I was wondering if theres any easy and fast way to obtain the decimal value of a signed hex in python.

What I do to check the value of a hex code is just open up python in terminal and type in the hex, it returns the decimal like this:

>>>0x0024
36
>>>0xcafe
51966

So I was wondering, is there any way that I could do that for signed short hex? for example 0xfffc should return -4

Answer 1

import ctypes

def hex2dec(v):
    return ctypes.c_int16(v).value

print hex2dec(0xfffc)
print hex2dec(0x0024)
print hex2dec(0xcafe)