[SciPy-user] passings arrays into C extension

[Travis Oliphant]

mike cantor wrote:

>Hi,
>
>What is the blessed way to pass SciPy arrays into C extension code (that 
>is, to convert Array PthonObjs into a C int* or other array type).
>  
>
What would you like the equivalent of? 

You can access the data attribute (which is the pointer to raw memory as)

dptr = (<yourtype> *)PyArray_DATA(array)

You should be aware of  PyArray_FLAGS(array) however because the data
might be unaligned, not in machine-byte order, or not writeable, or not
contiguous in memory.    If you need a contiguous chunk of "behaved memory"
you can use:

/* This doesn't make sure you have an integer array */

newarr = PyArray_From_OF(array, CARRAY_FLAGS);

dptr = (int *)PyArray_DATA(newarr);

/* code that uses dptr */

Py_DECREF(newarr);


If you need the "misbehaved" memory to receive the updates after the 
copy is made use
CARRAY_FLAGS | UPDATEIFCOPY  in the PyArray_From_OF(...) macro then when 
newarr is DECREF'd it will update the contents of array.


If you are talking about passing something to the ctypes module, then

int(array.__array_data__[0],0) 

will give you an integer that is a pointer to your data.

-Travis