Question

I’m trying to translate the c++ code and i can’t work out what “char linebuf[1000]” is, can some kind sole translate this to python or explain what linebuf is. Thanks! 🙂 Taken from http://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaUsage.html

if  (ch  ==  '\r'  ||  ch  ==  '\n')  {
     char  linebuf[1000];
     int  curLine  =  GetCurrentLineNumber();
     int  lineLength  =  SendEditor(SCI_LINELENGTH,  curLine);
     //Platform::DebugPrintf("[CR] %d len = %d\n", curLine, lineLength);
     if  (curLine  >  0  &&  lineLength  <=  2)  {
     int  prevLineLength  =  SendEditor(SCI_LINELENGTH,  curLine  -  1);
     if  (prevLineLength  <  sizeof(linebuf))  {
         WORD  buflen  =  sizeof(linebuf);
         memcpy(linebuf,  &buflen,  sizeof(buflen));
         SendEditor(EM_GETLINE,  curLine  -  1,
                    reinterpret_cast<LPARAM>(static_cast<char  *>(linebuf)));
         linebuf[prevLineLength]  =  '\0';
         for  (int  pos  =  0;  linebuf[pos];  pos++)  {
             if  (linebuf[pos]  !=  ' '  &&  linebuf[pos]  !=  '\t')
                 linebuf[pos]  =  '\0';
         }
         SendEditor(EM_REPLACESEL,  0,  reinterpret_cast<LPARAM>(static_cast<char  *>(linebuf)));
     }
}

Answer 1

It is a buffer for a line of input text, of type char[1000], i.e. an array of 1000 char elements (which are actually bytes, because C++ is based upon C, which in turn predates the whole idea of character encodings).

If we really wanted a literal translation of the algorithm, the closest fit in Python is probably something like array.array('B', [0]*1000). However, this initializes the Python array, whereas the C++ array is uninitialized – there is really no way to skip that initialization in C++; it just reserves space without paying any attention to what’s already in that chunk of memory.