A GL_BITMAP and bitwise operations question

Ok these aren't strictly OpenGL questions, the first is more a pure Python
question but, I thought I'd ask it here anyway. The GL_BITMAP question is
definitely Python OpenGL.

In C I can declare an array of char, but using pointer arithmetic I can process
it as though it were an array of integers - ie. 32 bits (4 chars) at a time.

Question 1:  Bitwise array processing in Python.
Is there any way to do such a thing efficiently in Python ?  eg. using Numpy, or
am I looking at having to write a C module ?

Application: I want to read back a chunk of the stencil buffer from the graphics
card, which OpenGL and Python OpenGL _will_ let me do, as a bitmap.


Question 2: GL_BITMAP storage format in Python.
Now even _there_ is a problem - glReadPixels() from the stencil buffer masked to
1 bit (lsb) with a GL_BITMAP target returns what in Python ?
A string ?


Anyway, because the return a bitmpap, each byte is 8 pixels, one bit per pixel i
want to process them in groups of 4 bytes (just bitwise logical ops) - its
trivially easy in C, but I can't see any way to do it in Python that is fast
because Python's data types are a bit abstracted.

Anybody attempted this feat or got any ideas on the above questions ?

Best
Jon



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