Is ctypes appropriate in my case?

[Terry Reedy]

dudeja.rajat at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 6:51 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu 
> <mailto:tjreedy at udel.edu>> wrote:
> 
>     dudeja.rajat at gmail.com <mailto:dudeja.rajat at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>         Hi,
> 
>         I've a dll and its header file that controls an hardware. I want
>         to write a wrapper for this dll in Python.
>         What is the best way that I can write a wrapper?
> 
> 
>     What do you want to do with the wrapper?
> 
> 
> I'm intending to use STAF - software testing automation framework where 
> I want to test this dll. Test cases for STAF are written in xml and 
> python. So for this I want to write a wrapper class for this dll in 
> python that has Dll API's as the member function of the wrapper class.
> 
> This class will be in a python module. This module can be then be 
> imported in the test cases thereby exposing the dll APIs for testing.
> 
> Please suggest if there are better solutions around.
>  
> 
> 
> 
>         I know ctypes modules and have used it before. As far as I know
>         ctypes is only used to call the dll functions in a python module.
> 
> 
>     I am not sure what you mean here.  Python code can directly import
>     and call functions in dlls that represent Python extension modules
>     and that are placed in the Pythonxx/dlls directory in your Windows
>     Python installation.  Ctypes is mostly used to call functions in a
>     dll that is *not* a python extension module, that was not written
>     for Python.
> 
>     --
>     http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> 
> Well I did not know this. What is a Python extension module?

For CPython, an importable module written in C.  There is a doc 
Extending and Embedding the Python Interpreter.  But I expect you can 
write the class in Python with ctypes.