Unsung Modules Redux

[Dave Brueck]

On Fri, 20 Dec 2002, Scherer, Bill wrote:

> So, what's your favorite unsung module today?

ctypes!

With stuff like Pysco and Pyrex maturing, the main reason I was still
writing C extensions was to access various Windows APIs (especially those
not covered in the Win32 Python extensions), but no longer - I may never
write another "wrapper" extension again and that makes me very, very
happy. :)

For example, here's some code that normally would live in a C extension:

from ctypes import windll, c_string

def GetDesktopPath():
    'Returns the path to the desktop folder or an empty string on error'
    path = c_string('\000' * 1000)
    if windll.shfolder.SHGetFolderPathA(0, 0x0010, 0, 0, path) == 0:
        return path.value
    return ''

Woohoo!

-Dave