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14.14.1.7 Specifying the required argument types (function prototypes)


14.14.1.7 Specifying the required argument types (function prototypes)

It is possible to specify the required argument types of functions exported from DLLs by setting the argtypes attribute.

argtypes must be a sequence of C data types (the printf function is probably not a good example here, because it takes a variable number and different types of parameters depending on the format string, on the other hand this is quite handy to experiment with this feature):

>>> printf.argtypes = [c_char_p, c_char_p, c_int, c_double]
>>> printf("String '%s', Int %d, Double %f\n", "Hi", 10, 2.2)
String 'Hi', Int 10, Double 2.200000
37
>>>

Specifying a format protects against incompatible argument types (just as a prototype for a C function), and tries to convert the arguments to valid types:

>>> printf("%d %d %d", 1, 2, 3)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
ArgumentError: argument 2: exceptions.TypeError: wrong type
>>> printf("%s %d %f", "X", 2, 3)
X 2 3.00000012
12
>>>

If you have defined your own classes which you pass to function calls, you have to implement a from_param class method for them to be able to use them in the argtypes sequence. The from_param class method receives the Python object passed to the function call, it should do a typecheck or whatever is needed to make sure this object is acceptable, and then return the object itself, it's _as_parameter_ attribute, or whatever you want to pass as the C function argument in this case. Again, the result should be an integer, string, unicode, a ctypes instance, or something having the _as_parameter_ attribute.

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