declaration problem

[Steve Holden]

Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch wrote:
> On Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:05:22 +0530, devi thapa wrote:
> 
>> I am using the command
>>
>> recv(..) to receive a message from client.
>>
>> retval = recv(my_socket, *buf, len(buf) , 0)
>>
>> and its giving this error
>>
>>  File "./server1.py", line 31
>>     retval = recv(my_socket, *buf, len(buf) , 0)
>>                                                                 ^
>> SyntaxError: invalid syntax
> 
> ``*buf`` means "unpack everything in `buf` as if it where written as 
> positional arguments".  It is not some "pointer dereferencing" syntax, as 
> Python doesn't have pointers as data types.  After argument unpacking it 
> is not allowed to have other positional arguments.  That's the syntax 
> error.
> 
>>From where do you get `recv()` anyway?  And what is `my_socket`?  Most 
> certainly not an instance created with `socket.socket` because then you 
> would use the `recv()` method of that object.
> 
It's C, loosely transcribed as pseudo-Python. For some clues about
networking, take a look at

  http://holdenweb.com/docs/NetProg.pdf

but this does assume you want to learn Python, not carry on writing C.

[Jack, the above is address to Devi, not you].

regards
 Steve
-- 
Steve Holden        +1 571 484 6266   +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC              http://www.holdenweb.com/