Question

I have a third-party product, a terminal emulator, which provides a DLL that can be linked to a C program to basically automate the driving of this product (send keystrokes, detect what’s on the screen and so forth).

I want to drive it from a scripting language (I’m comfortable with Python and slightly less so with Perl) so that we don’t have to compile and send out executables to our customers whenever there’s a problem found.

We also want the customers to be able to write their own scripts using ours as baselines and they won’t entertain the idea of writing and compiling C code.

What’s a good way of getting Python/Perl to interface to a Windows DLL. My first thought was to write a server program and have a Python script communicate with it via TCP but there’s got to be an easier solution.

Answer 1

One way to call C libraries from Python is to use ctypes:

>>> from ctypes import * >>> windll.user32.MessageBoxA(None, 'Hello world', 'ctypes', 0);