Integer square root in python

Question

Is there an integer square root somewhere in python, or in standard libraries? I want it to be exact (i.e. return an integer), and raise an exception if the input isn't a perfect square.

I tried using this code:

def isqrt(n):
    i = int(math.sqrt(n) + 0.5)
    if i**2 == n:
        return i
    raise ValueError('input was not a perfect square')

But it's ugly and I don't really trust it for large integers. I could iterate through the squares and give up if I've exceeded the value, but I assume it would be kinda slow to do something like that. Also, surely this is already implemented somewhere?

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_{See also: Check if a number is a perfect square.}

Answer 1

Note: There is now math.isqrt in stdlib, available since Python 3.8.

Newton's method works perfectly well on integers:

def isqrt(n):
    x = n
    y = (x + 1) // 2
    while y < x:
        x = y
        y = (x + n // x) // 2
    return x

This returns the largest integer x for which x * x does not exceed n. If you want to check if the result is exactly the square root, simply perform the multiplication to check if n is a perfect square.

I discuss this algorithm, and three other algorithms for calculating square roots, at my blog.