ctypes: Get full contents of character array

[overdrigzed at gmail.com]

On Sep 13, 6:45 am, "Aaron \"Castironpi\" Brady"
<castiro... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 12, 6:38 pm, overdrig... at gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Hello!
>
> > I wanted to get the full contents of a character array stored in a
> > struct, i.e.
> > _fields_ = [...("array", c_char * 12)...]
> > however,ctypesseems to try to return struct.array as a Python string
> > rather than a character array, and stops as soon as it encounters a
> > null within the character array.
>
> > I ended up having to define a dummy struct
> > class dummystruct(Structure):
> >     _fields_ = []
>
> > and declare array as:
> > ("array", dummystruct)
>
> > then use string_at(byref(struct.array), 12).
>
> > Is this really the best way of doing it? Is there no better way to
> > work aroundctypes'guess what you want' behaviour?
>
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Rodrigo
>
> Rodrigo,
>
> If you have the option to change your declaration to c_byte* 12, you
> have more options.  This example prints the null character you wanted.
>
> fromctypesimport *
> import struct
> class S( Structure ):
>     _fields_= [
>         ( 'array', c_byte* 12 )
>     ]
> s= S()
>
> #initialize
> struct.pack_into( '7s', s.array, 0, 'abc\x00def' )
>
> #prototype and call PyString_FromStringAndSize
> prototype= PYFUNCTYPE( py_object, POINTER( c_byte ), c_size_t )
> PyString_FromStringAndSize= prototype( ( "PyString_FromStringAndSize",
> pythonapi ) )
> x= PyString_FromStringAndSize( s.array, 12 )
> print repr( x )
>
> #prototype and call PyString_FromString for contrast
> prototype= PYFUNCTYPE( py_object, POINTER( c_byte ) )
> PyString_FromString= prototype( ( "PyString_FromString", pythonapi ) )
> x= PyString_FromString( s.array )
> print repr( x )
>
> /Output:
>
> 'abc\x00def\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'
> 'abc'

Great - and thank you for replying so fast! I found that [chr(x) for x
in struct.array] with array as a c_byte * 12 did what I needed.