1.1. A Simple Example¶

Let’s create an extension module called spam (the favorite food of Monty Python fans...) and let’s say we want to create a Python interface to the C library function system(). [1] This function takes a null-terminated character string as argument and returns an integer. We want this function to be callable from Python as follows:

>>> import spam
>>> status = spam.system("ls -l")

Begin by creating a file spammodule.c. (Historically, if a module is called spam, the C file containing its implementation is called spammodule.c; if the module name is very long, like spammify, the module name can be just spammify.c.)

The first line of our file can be:

#include <Python.h>

which pulls in the Python API (you can add a comment describing the purpose of the module and a copyright notice if you like).

All user-visible symbols defined by Python.h have a prefix of Py or PY, except those defined in standard header files. For convenience, and since they are used extensively by the Python interpreter, "Python.h" includes a few standard header files: <stdio.h>, <string.h>, <errno.h>, and <stdlib.h>. If the latter header file does not exist on your system, it declares the functions malloc(), free() and realloc() directly.

The next thing we add to our module file is the C function that will be called when the Python expression spam.system(string) is evaluated (we’ll see shortly how it ends up being called):

static PyObject *
spam_system(PyObject *self, PyObject *args)
{
    const char *command;
    int sts;
    if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, "s", &command))
        return NULL;
    sts = system(command);
    return Py_BuildValue("i", sts);
}

There is a straightforward translation from the argument list in Python (for example, the single expression "ls -l") to the arguments passed to the C function. The C function always has two arguments, conventionally named self and args.

The self argument points to the module object for module-level functions; for a method it would point to the object instance.

The args argument will be a pointer to a Python tuple object containing the arguments. Each item of the tuple corresponds to an argument in the call’s argument list. The arguments are Python objects — in order to do anything with them in our C function we have to convert them to C values. The function PyArg_ParseTuple() in the Python API checks the argument types and converts them to C values. It uses a template string to determine the required types of the arguments as well as the types of the C variables into which to store the converted values. More about this later.

PyArg_ParseTuple() returns true (nonzero) if all arguments have the right type and its components have been stored in the variables whose addresses are passed. It returns false (zero) if an invalid argument list was passed. In the latter case it also raises an appropriate exception so the calling function can return NULL immediately (as we saw in the example).

1.2. Intermezzo: Errors and Exceptions¶

An important convention throughout the Python interpreter is the following: when a function fails, it should set an exception condition and return an error value (usually a NULL pointer). Exceptions are stored in a static global variable inside the interpreter; if this variable is NULL no exception has occurred. A second global variable stores the “associated value” of the exception (the second argument to raise). A third variable contains the stack traceback in case the error originated in Python code. These three variables are the C equivalents of the Python variables sys.exc_type, sys.exc_value and sys.exc_traceback (see the section on module sys in the Python Library Reference). It is important to know about them to understand how errors are passed around.

The Python API defines a number of functions to set various types of exceptions.

The most common one is PyErr_SetString(). Its arguments are an exception object and a C string. The exception object is usually a predefined object like PyExc_ZeroDivisionError. The C string indicates the cause of the error and is converted to a Python string object and stored as the “associated value” of the exception.

Another useful function is PyErr_SetFromErrno(), which only takes an exception argument and constructs the associated value by inspection of the global variable errno. The most general function is PyErr_SetObject(), which takes two object arguments, the exception and its associated value. You don’t need to Py_INCREF() the objects passed to any of these functions.

You can test non-destructively whether an exception has been set with PyErr_Occurred(). This returns the current exception object, or NULL if no exception has occurred. You normally don’t need to call PyErr_Occurred() to see whether an error occurred in a function call, since you should be able to tell from the return value.

When a function f that calls another function g detects that the latter fails, f should itself return an error value (usually NULL or -1). It should not call one of the PyErr_*() functions — one has already been called by g. f‘s caller is then supposed to also return an error indication to its caller, again without calling PyErr_*(), and so on — the most detailed cause of the error was already reported by the function that first detected it. Once the error reaches the Python interpreter’s main loop, this aborts the currently executing Python code and tries to find an exception handler specified by the Python programmer.

(There are situations where a module can actually give a more detailed error message by calling another PyErr_*() function, and in such cases it is fine to do so. As a general rule, however, this is not necessary, and can cause information about the cause of the error to be lost: most operations can fail for a variety of reasons.)

To ignore an exception set by a function call that failed, the exception condition must be cleared explicitly by calling PyErr_Clear(). The only time C code should call PyErr_Clear() is if it doesn’t want to pass the error on to the interpreter but wants to handle it completely by itself (possibly by trying something else, or pretending nothing went wrong).

Every failing malloc() call must be turned into an exception — the direct caller of malloc() (or realloc()) must call PyErr_NoMemory() and return a failure indicator itself. All the object-creating functions (for example, PyInt_FromLong()) already do this, so this note is only relevant to those who call malloc() directly.

Also note that, with the important exception of PyArg_ParseTuple() and friends, functions that return an integer status usually return a positive value or zero for success and -1 for failure, like Unix system calls.

Finally, be careful to clean up garbage (by making Py_XDECREF() or Py_DECREF() calls for objects you have already created) when you return an error indicator!

The choice of which exception to raise is entirely yours. There are predeclared C objects corresponding to all built-in Python exceptions, such as PyExc_ZeroDivisionError, which you can use directly. Of course, you should choose exceptions wisely — don’t use PyExc_TypeError to mean that a file couldn’t be opened (that should probably be PyExc_IOError). If something’s wrong with the argument list, the PyArg_ParseTuple() function usually raises PyExc_TypeError. If you have an argument whose value must be in a particular range or must satisfy other conditions, PyExc_ValueError is appropriate.

You can also define a new exception that is unique to your module. For this, you usually declare a static object variable at the beginning of your file:

static PyObject *SpamError;

and initialize it in your module’s initialization function (initspam()) with an exception object (leaving out the error checking for now):

PyMODINIT_FUNC
initspam(void)
{
    PyObject *m;
    m = Py_InitModule("spam", SpamMethods);
    if (m == NULL)
        return;
    SpamError = PyErr_NewException("spam.error", NULL, NULL);
    Py_INCREF(SpamError);
    PyModule_AddObject(m, "error", SpamError);
}

Note that the Python name for the exception object is spam.error. The PyErr_NewException() function may create a class with the base class being Exception (unless another class is passed in instead of NULL), described in Built-in Exceptions.

Note also that the SpamError variable retains a reference to the newly created exception class; this is intentional! Since the exception could be removed from the module by external code, an owned reference to the class is needed to ensure that it will not be discarded, causing SpamError to become a dangling pointer. Should it become a dangling pointer, C code which raises the exception could cause a core dump or other unintended side effects.

We discuss the use of PyMODINIT_FUNC as a function return type later in this sample.

The spam.error exception can be raised in your extension module using a call to PyErr_SetString() as shown below:

static PyObject *
spam_system(PyObject *self, PyObject *args)
{
    const char *command;
    int sts;
    if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, "s", &command))
        return NULL;
    sts = system(command);
    if (sts < 0) {
        PyErr_SetString(SpamError, "System command failed");
        return NULL;
    }
    return PyLong_FromLong(sts);
}

1.3. Back to the Example¶

Going back to our example function, you should now be able to understand this statement:

if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, "s", &command))
    return NULL;

It returns NULL (the error indicator for functions returning object pointers) if an error is detected in the argument list, relying on the exception set by PyArg_ParseTuple(). Otherwise the string value of the argument has been copied to the local variable command. This is a pointer assignment and you are not supposed to modify the string to which it points (so in Standard C, the variable command should properly be declared as const char *command).

The next statement is a call to the Unix function system(), passing it the string we just got from PyArg_ParseTuple():

sts = system(command);

Our spam.system() function must return the value of sts as a Python object. This is done using the function Py_BuildValue(), which is something like the inverse of PyArg_ParseTuple(): it takes a format string and an arbitrary number of C values, and returns a new Python object. More info on Py_BuildValue() is given later.

return Py_BuildValue("i", sts);

In this case, it will return an integer object. (Yes, even integers are objects on the heap in Python!)

If you have a C function that returns no useful argument (a function returning void), the corresponding Python function must return None. You need this idiom to do so (which is implemented by the Py_RETURN_NONE macro):

Py_INCREF(Py_None);
return Py_None;

Py_None is the C name for the special Python object None. It is a genuine Python object rather than a NULL pointer, which means “error” in most contexts, as we have seen.

1.4. The Module’s Method Table and Initialization Function¶

I promised to show how spam_system() is called from Python programs. First, we need to list its name and address in a “method table”:

static PyMethodDef SpamMethods[] = {
    ...
    {"system",  spam_system, METH_VARARGS,
     "Execute a shell command."},
    ...
    {NULL, NULL, 0, NULL}        /* Sentinel */
};

Note the third entry (METH_VARARGS). This is a flag telling the interpreter the calling convention to be used for the C function. It should normally always be METH_VARARGS or METH_VARARGS | METH_KEYWORDS; a value of 0 means that an obsolete variant of PyArg_ParseTuple() is used.

When using only METH_VARARGS, the function should expect the Python-level parameters to be passed in as a tuple acceptable for parsing via PyArg_ParseTuple(); more information on this function is provided below.

The METH_KEYWORDS bit may be set in the third field if keyword arguments should be passed to the function. In this case, the C function should accept a third PyObject * parameter which will be a dictionary of keywords. Use PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() to parse the arguments to such a function.

The method table must be passed to the interpreter in the module’s initialization function. The initialization function must be named initname(), where name is the name of the module, and should be the only non-static item defined in the module file:

PyMODINIT_FUNC
initspam(void)
{
    (void) Py_InitModule("spam", SpamMethods);
}

Note that PyMODINIT_FUNC declares the function as void return type, declares any special linkage declarations required by the platform, and for C++ declares the function as extern "C".

When the Python program imports module spam for the first time, initspam() is called. (See below for comments about embedding Python.) It calls Py_InitModule(), which creates a “module object” (which is inserted in the dictionary sys.modules under the key "spam"), and inserts built-in function objects into the newly created module based upon the table (an array of PyMethodDef structures) that was passed as its second argument. Py_InitModule() returns a pointer to the module object that it creates (which is unused here). It may abort with a fatal error for certain errors, or return NULL if the module could not be initialized satisfactorily.

When embedding Python, the initspam() function is not called automatically unless there’s an entry in the _PyImport_Inittab table. The easiest way to handle this is to statically initialize your statically-linked modules by directly calling initspam() after the call to Py_Initialize():

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