Question

I need to save a tuple of 4 numbers inside a column that only accepts numbers (int or floats)

I have a list of 4 number like -0.0123445552, -29394.2393339, 0.299393333, 0.00002345556.

How can I “store” all these numbers inside a number and be able to retrieve the original tuple in Python?

Thanks

Answer 1

Following up on @YevgenYampolskiy’s idea of using numpy:

You could use numpy to convert the numbers to 16-bit floats, and then view the array as one 64-bit int:

import numpy as np

data = np.array((-0.0123445552, -29394.2393339, 0.299393333, 0.00002345556))

stored_int = data.astype('float16').view('int64')[0]
print(stored_int)
# 110959187158999634

recovered = np.array([stored_int], dtype='int64').view('float16')
print(recovered)
# [ -1.23443604e-02  -2.93920000e+04   2.99316406e-01   2.34842300e-05]

Note: This requires numpy version 1.6 or better, as this was the first version to support 16-bit floats.