How to pass pointer back in ctypes?

Question

Don\'t know much about ctypes, just recently began working with it.

I have a simple function in C-like dll which returns a pointer to the dynamically generated strin

Answer 1

You're on the right track.

// TestDLL.cpp
#include  // strcpy

extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) char* stringdup(const char* str) {
    char* p = new char[strlen(str)+1];
    strcpy(p,str);
    return p;
}

// if you have no good reason to use void*, use the type
// you've allocated. while it usually works for built-in
// types, it wouldn't work for classes (it wouldn't call
// the destructor)
extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) void stringfree(char* ptr) {
    // you don't need to check for 0 before you delete it,
    // but if you allocate with new[], free with delete[] !
    delete [] ptr; 
}

And in python:

# Test.py
import ctypes

lib = ctypes.cdll.TestDLL

# this creates a c-style char pointer, initialized with a string whose
# memory is managed by PYTHON! do not attempt to free it through the DLL!
cstr = ctypes.c_char_p("hello ctypes")

# call the dll function that returns a char pointer 
# whose memory is managed by the DLL.
p = lib.stringdup(cstr)

# p is just an integer containing the memory address of the 
# char array. therefore, this just prints the address:
print p

# this prints the actual string
print ctypes.c_char_p(p).value

# free the memory through the DLL
lib.stringfree(p)