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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Release 2.5, documentation updated on 19th September, 2006.