title: How characters and integers are stored in Python
body: <p>I am aware that in C, characters are 1 byte, and ints are 4 bytes. When I run this code in Python to determine the storage of characters and integers, I get unexpected values. Could anyone explain this discrepancy?</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; sys.getsizeof(1)
  24
  &gt;&gt;&gt; sys.getsizeof(10)
  24
  &gt;&gt;&gt; sys.getsizeof(100)
  24
  &gt;&gt;&gt; sys.getsizeof("a")
  38
  &gt;&gt;&gt; sys.getsizeof("b")
  38
  &gt;&gt;&gt; dump = cPickle.dumps(1)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; sys.getsizeof(dump)
  41
  &gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&gt;&gt; sys.getsizeof(chr(65))
  38
  </code></pre>