Preston, The best place for Boost.Python questions is the C++-sig: http://www.boost.org/more/mailing_lists.htm#cplussig "Preston A. Elder" <prez@neuromancy.net> writes:
I have some functions in C++ that take a void *, for example hexdump(). The main use of this, obviously, is to pass a buffer and get the hex dump as a return value - without having to worry about the type passed, eg:
std::string str("This is a test"); hexdump(str.data(), str.length());
std::wstring wstr(L"This is a test") hexdump(str.data(), str.length() * sizeof(wchar_t));
I want to know the best way of exposing such a function to python without being too 'string specific' (theres no reason I couldn't do hexdump(&some_int, sizeof(int)) in C++, so I want something similar in python, if I can get it).
You have to decide what kind of interface you want in Python; nobody can tell you what that should be. Write down some examples of Python code showing what you'd like to be able to do with hexdump.
Now hexdump is only an example, I have a few other functions that do the same (for example, recv() and send() in a socket class).
Any ideas would be appreciated. Right now, the best thing I can think of is to create a wrapper function (for use in the python interface only) that accepts a std::string/std::wstring and calls hexdump, however this hamstrings me when I want to do things like integers, or complex structures.
Unless you can come up with some code that can take an arbitrary complex structure and magically produce a contiguous array of bytes for hexdump to work on, I think you're out of luck.
Also, on another note, is there somewhere that has all of boost already pythonized?
No.
I manually converted boost::date_time (at least all the gregorian and posix_time stuff) myself, however I would have expected most of boost to have been converted to python already ;)
It seems unlikely to me. Because so much of Boost is heavily templated generic code, a great deal of it would make no sense as Python wrappers. Can you imagine Pythonizing the Boost.Python library? ;-) -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com