14.14.1.16 Incomplete Types

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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
>>>

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