Neil Schemenauer <nas-python@python.ca> writes:
Looks like I was a little quick sending out that message. I found more recent postings from Tim and Guido:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-July/026408.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-July/026413.html
Slippery little beast, that buffer object. :-) I'm going to go ahead and add deprecation warnings.
I used it once in combination with ctypes as buffer(a-ctypes-object) to get at the raw memory whicy ctypes objects expose via the buffer API. But it was pretty obscure, and I would happily have used an external module. Like this:
import ctypes n = ctypes.c_int(12) buffer(n) <read-only buffer for 0x008F6530, ptr 0x0093FB88, size 4 at 0x00977980> str(buffer(n)) '\x0c\x00\x00\x00'
Basically, the only serious use case is getting the bytes out of objects which support the buffer API but which *don't* offer a "get the bytes out" interface. I've just realised that I could, however, also do this via the array module:
from array import array a = array('c') a.fromstring(n) # Hey - fromstring means "from buffer API"! a.tostring() '\x0c\x00\x00\x00'
There's an extra copy in there. Disaster :-) Nope, I don't think there's a good use case after all... Paul -- This signature intentionally left blank