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Paul, it seems as though there exists a Python function in
pickle that does conversions: encode_long() and
decode_long(), though depending on the size of your longs, a
custom version may be faster (I wrote one that doesn't use
hex, and manages to be 20% faster on integers less than 32
bits).

It also appears that Raymond is going to be placing such a
pair of functions in binascii.

I'm curious as to whether you prefer a variable-width return
as provided by pickle.encode_long, or a fixed-width return
as provided by the struct method I propose.