Question

I’ve got a DLL written in C (that I can’t edit) that has some function prototype that looks like

#include <stdio.h>
void foo(FILE *bar);

I’d like to create a JNA interface to the DLL and it’s unclear what I need to pass for the FILE *bar argument. I assume I need to pass an InputStream (which is my preference), but the JNA literature seems sparse on the subject.

What would the Java interface look like? and what do I really need to pass to foo?

Edit: foo assumes bar is the result of an fopen and calls operations like fscanf.

Edit 2: Ultimately, I have a string in Java that I need to read in C as if it were a file, (which might be a different question altogether). Ideally I’d like to avoid writing the file, which is why converting an InputStream to a C file pointer is so desirable (and evidently quite difficult).

Answer 1

I don’t believe you can do this – you have no easy way to access the internals of of an InputStream instance, and even a FileInputStream will most likely not be implemented on top of a stdio FILE *. To see what your Java interface should be like, you’ll need to post more about the foo function – what it does and how you use it.

If you don’t care about what the FILE * actually does, you can code up using JNA to call fopen, passing in the file name and open mode, and pass the result as an opaque value through to foo, e.g. (pseudocode):

path = "MyFile.txt";
bar = Libc.fopen(path, "r");
Libfoo.foo(bar);

Update: If you need to have a string which contains data which you need treated as if it were in a file, I think you are out of luck. Unfortunately, the standard C library is not built on top of a stream abstraction, which means that you are unlikely to be able to achieve what you want unless you can open what looks like a filename but leads to your string data; however, it’s going to be much, much easier to bite the bullet and save the string to a temporary file, then open that with fopen 🙁