C API: array of floats/ints from python to C and back

[Daniel Fetchinson]

I'm trying to write an extension module in C which contains a single
function with the following prototype:

void func( int N, int * arg1, int * arg2, int * ret );

Here arg1 and arg2 are length N arrays, and the function computes ret
which is also an N length array. From python I'd like to call this
function as

ret = func( [ 1, 2, 3 ], [ 2, 3, 4] )

I've read through the docs at
http://docs.python.org/extending/extending.html and also
http://docs.python.org/c-api/arg.html from which I learned how to pass
a fixed number of basic datatypes (int, float, string) from python to
C and back. What I don't know is how to pass an array back and forth.

As far as I can see PyArg_ParseTuple is the function I should use for
converting the python arguments to C but the format string passed to
PyArg_ParseTuple can only be one of the basic data types ("s", "i",
etc) or a generic python object ("O").

Does this mean that I can only pass the arrays from python to C as
generic python objects and in a later operation I need to get the
elements from this generic python object, construct a C array and pass
that to the C function? Since I assume this is a frequent operation
I'd think there are some shortcuts, aren't there? Or what's the
simplest way of doing this?

Cheers,
Daniel

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