How to use C++ lib from python

Question

I would like to know how to use python to make calls to a C++ library called libwpd to read word perfect files and build python objects from them, but I have no experience with C++ or calling C++ functions from python, and I don't understand how to figure out what the output of these library functions would be. So that's really two questions:

• 1) how to call C++ functions from python, and
• 2) how to figure out what the output of these functions would be--namely, the result of the WPDocument::parse function (see http://www.abisource.com/~uwog/libwpd/) and how to use it in my python code. The function appears to return an object WPDResult, but I can't figure out what it does or how I would use it.

I looked into SWIG briefly, and it looks promising. Thoughts?

Answer 1

The Boost.Python library allows easy interoperability between C++ and Python.

The tutorial shows how to wrap C++ functions and classes to use them from Python.

Answer 2

Checkout ctypes. It's part of the standard Python library set. I can't speak to it's use with C++, but I suspect it will work nicely.