Newbie: SWIG or SIP?

[Brent W. Hughes]

I have a third-party DLL and it's associated .h file. The DLL was written
in C. I have neither the associated .c files nor the .obj files for the
DLL. Can I use SWIG or SIP to build something that will allow me to use the
DLL with Python? And what is that something, an .obj file, another DLL or
what?

Brent

 

[Larry Bates]

You can call the .DLL file by using a solution
I wrote (and donated) some time ago. It is located here:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/146847

You will need calldll.pyd available here:

http://www.nightmare.com/software.html

I've used this solution a LOT and it has worked with .DLLs
from many different manufacturers. Tricky part is having a
full definition of API to dll (e.g. argument types) and using
struct module to communicate between Python and the .DLL.

Larry Bates

 

[Peter Hansen]

You can call the .DLL file by using a solution
I wrote (and donated) some time ago. It is located here:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/146847

You will need calldll.pyd available here:

http://www.nightmare.com/software.html

While calldll works for this (and I greatly appreciated having
it in the past), I'm pretty sure that for pretty much all
purposes "ctypes" is the preferred approach at this point.
If nothing else, it is actively maintained, while calldll is not.
I'm pretty sure ctypes is also easier to use.

-Peter

 

[Caleb Hattingh]

Brent

Google "python ctypes". ctypes is cool

keep well
Caleb

 

[Phil Thompson]

I have a third-party DLL and it's associated .h file. The DLL was written

in C. I have neither the associated .c files nor the .obj files for the
DLL. Can I use SWIG or SIP to build something that will allow me to use
the
DLL with Python? And what is that something, an .obj file, another DLL or
what?

Yes, you can use either SWIG or SIP. C (as opposed to C++) support was
added with SIP v4. The something is another DLL, conventionally given a
..pyd extenstion.

Phil

 

[suryaprakashg]

Look at this , this might be more simple to use

http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/

 

[Grant Edwards]

Look at this , this might be more simple to use

http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/

ctypes completely rocks. I'm guessing it's a little more
overhead than using a swigified DLL, but it's dead-easy to use
and doesn't require a C or C++ compiler. For the stuff I do, a
bit of extra overhead when calling DLL's is completely
negligible.