14.14.1.16 Incomplete Types

Python 2.5

previous page next page

14.14.1.16 Incomplete Types

Incomplete Types are structures, unions or arrays whose members are not yet specified. In C, they are specified by forward declarations, which are defined later:

struct cell; /* forward declaration */

struct {
    char *name;
    struct cell *next;
} cell;

The straightforward translation into ctypes code would be this, but it does not work:

>>> class cell(Structure):
...     _fields_ = [("name", c_char_p),
...                 ("next", POINTER(cell))]
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in cell
NameError: name 'cell' is not defined
>>>

because the new class cell is not available in the class statement itself. In ctypes, we can define the cell class and set the _fields_ attribute later, after the class statement:

>>> from ctypes import *
>>> class cell(Structure):
...     pass
...
>>> cell._fields_ = [("name", c_char_p),
...                  ("next", POINTER(cell))]
>>>

Lets try it. We create two instances of cell, and let them point to each other, and finally follow the pointer chain a few times:

>>> c1 = cell()
>>> c1.name = "foo"
>>> c2 = cell()
>>> c2.name = "bar"
>>> c1.next = pointer(c2)
>>> c2.next = pointer(c1)
>>> p = c1
>>> for i in range(8):
...     print p.name,
...     p = p.next[0]
...
foo bar foo bar foo bar foo bar
>>>

See About this document... for information on suggesting changes.

previous page start next page