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Python Programming On Win32
book

Python Programming On Win32

by Andy Robinson, Mark Hammond
January 2000
Intermediate to advanced
672 pages
21h 46m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Python Programming On Win32

Dynamic DLL Access

As we mentioned in Chapter 13, Sam Rushing (http://www.nightmare.com) has written an extension that allows Python to dynamically load and call any function in any DLL, not just special Python extensions. For the C programmers among you, these are equivalent to using the Windows API functions LoadLibrary() and GetProcAddress().

These tools offer a great deal of power but also carry risks. When using Python extension modules such as the Win32 extensions, you can be fairly confident the worst that will happen is a Python exception. When dynamically accessing a DLL, you are responsible for ensuring the arguments you pass are the correct type; an error in doing so can corrupt the stack and lead to either seriously misleading results or a crash.

Using these tools, Sam has built a comprehensive ODBC module that allows access to every function in the ODBC API and to a GUI application framework sitting directly on top of the Windows API.

In general, the safest way to access existing C libraries is to build Python extension modules. However, there may be occasions when a C compiler isn’t available or when dynamic loading and unloading are required. A case study mentioned in Chapter 1, uses Calldll/Windll to interface to an encoding translation library that moves megabytes of data between operating systems each day; for political reasons, C/C++ development was not an option in this case.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565926218Errata Page