Hashing an address for binary file

[deanhystad]

As far as I know (or found with minimal search efforts) the behavior of seeking past the end of a file is not defined. This simple test packs the first 32 bytes with zeros.

with open("test.bin", "wb") as file:
    file.seek(32)
    file.write(b"Where's Waldo")

Output:
Dump
................
................
Where's Waldo

But this might just be the behavior for the compiler I am using or the platform I am running on. I have not found anything definitive that says this is what I should expect. And since I don't know this will always work, I am not going to depend on it ever working.

Either way I would never use the value returned by hash as a file offset. hash(2000) == 2000 and hash(2001) == 2001. 2000 requires at least 3 bytes of storage, so I cannot store 2000 and 2001 using your scheme. And what about this?

x = "one"
y = "two"
print(hash(x), hash(y), id(x), id(y))

Output:
6029220552427752314 -4114662839508124676 1827875350256 1827875262064

I don't think I can seek(-4114662839508124676), and I don't want to make a 6029220552427752317 byte file to store "one".