I have a C function mapped to Swift defined as:
func swe_set_eph_path(path: UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>) -> Void
I am trying to pass a path to the function and have tried:
var path = [Int8](count: 1024, repeatedValue: 0);
for i in 0...NSBundle.mainBundle().bundlePath.lengthOfBytesUsingEncoding(NSUTF16StringEncoding)-1
{
var range = i..<i+1
path[i] = String.toInt(NSBundle.mainBundle().bundlePath[range])
}
println("\(path)")
swe_set_ephe_path(&path)
but on the path[i] line I get the error:
'subscript' is unavailable: cannot subscript String with a range of
Int
swe_set_ephe_path(NSBundle.mainBundle().bundlePath)
nor
swe_set_ephe_path(&NSBundle.mainBundle().bundlePath)
don't work either
Besides not working, I feel there has got to be a better, less convoluted way of doing this. Previous answers on StackOverflow using CString don't seem to work anymore. Any suggestions?
Previous answers on StackOverflow using CString don't seem to work anymore
Nevertheless, UnsafePointer<Int8> is a C string. If your context absolutely requires an UnsafeMutablePointer, just coerce, like this:
let s = NSBundle.mainBundle().bundlePath
let cs = (s as NSString).UTF8String
var buffer = UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>(cs)
swe_set_ephe_path(buffer)
Of course I don't have your swe_set_ephe_path, but it works fine in my testing when it is stubbed like this:
func swe_set_ephe_path(path: UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>) {
println(String.fromCString(path))
}
In current version of Swift language you can do it like this (other answers are outdated):
let path = Bundle.main.bundlePath
let param = UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>(mutating: (path as NSString).utf8String)
It’s actually extremely irritating of the library you’re using that it requires (in the C declaration) a char * path rather than const char * path. (this is assuming the function doesn’t mutate the input string – if it does, you’re in a whole different situation).
If it didn’t, the function would come over to Swift as:
// note, UnsafePointer not UnsafeMutablePointer
func swe_set_eph_path(path: UnsafePointer<Int8>) -> Void
and you could then rely on Swift’s implicit conversion:
let str = "blah"
swe_set_eph_path(str) // Swift implicitly converts Strings
// to const C strings when calling C funcs
But you can do an unsafe conversion quite easily, in combination with the withCString function:
str.withCString { cstr in
swe_set_eph_path(UnsafeMutablePointer(cstr))
}
I had a static library (someLibrary.a) written in C++ compiled for iOS.
The header file (someLibrary.h) had a function exposed like this:
extern long someFunction(char* aString);
The declaration in Swift looks like this:
Int someFunction(aString: UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>)
I made an extension to String:
extension String {
var UTF8CString: UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8> {
return UnsafeMutablePointer((self as NSString).UTF8String)
}
}
So then I can call the method like so:
someFunction(mySwiftString.UTF8CString)
Update: Make String extension (swift 5.7)
extension String {
var UTF8CString: UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8> {
return UnsafeMutablePointer(mutating: (self as NSString).utf8String!)
}
}
Related
Let's say I do the following in C++:
int i = 1;
int* ptr = &i;
*ptr = 2;
cout << i << '\n';
And I want to do something similar in swift. Could I do the following?
var i : Int = 1
var iptr : UnsafeMutablePointer<Int> = &i
iptr.memory = 2
print(i)
And achieve the same result?
Yes-ish.
You can't do it exactly as you've attempted in the question. It won't compile. Swift won't let you directly access the address of a value like this. At the end of the day, the reason is mostly because there's simply no good reason to do so.
We do see the & operator in Swift however.
First of all, there is the inout keyword when declaring function parameters:
func doubleIfPositive(inout value: Float) -> Bool {
if value > 0 {
value *= 2
return true
}
return false
}
And to call this method, we'd need the & operator:
let weMadeARadian = doubleIfPositive(&pi)
We can see it similarly used when we have a function which takes an argument of type UnsafeMutablePointer (and other variants of these pointer structs). In this specific case, it's primarily for interoperability with C & Objective-C, where we could declare a method as such:
bool doubleIfPositive(float * value) -> bool {
if (value > 0) {
value *= 2;
return true;
}
return false;
}
The Swift interface for that method ends up looking somethin like this:
func doubleIfPositive(value: UnsafeMutablePointer<Float>) -> Bool
And calling this method from Swift actually looks just like it did before when using the inout approach:
let weMadeARadian = doubleIfPositive(&pi)
But these are the only two uses of this & operator I can find in Swift.
With that said, we can write a function that makes use of the second form of passing an argument into a method with the & operator and returns that variable wrapped in an unsafe mutable pointer. It looks like this:
func addressOf<T>(value: UnsafeMutablePointer<T>) -> UnsafeMutablePointer<T> {
return value
}
And it behaves about as you'd expect from your original code snippet:
var i: Int = 1
var iPtr = addressOf(&i)
iPtr.memory = 2
print(i) // prints 2
As noted by Kevin in the comments, we can also directly allocate memory if we want.
var iPtr = UnsafeMutablePointer<Int>.alloc(1)
The argument 1 here is effectively the mount of space to allocate. This says we want to allocate enough memory for a single Int.
This is roughly equivalent to the following C code:
int * iPtr = malloc(1 * sizeof(int));
BUT...
If you're doing any of this for anything other than interoperability with C or Objective-C, you're most likely not Swifting correctly. So before you start running around town with pointers to value types in Swift, please, make sure it's what you absolutely need to be doing. I've been writing Swift since release, and I've never found the need for any of these shenanigans.
Like this (not the only way, but it's clear):
var i : Int = 1
withUnsafeMutablePointer(&i) {
iptr -> () in
iptr.memory = 2
}
print(i)
Not a very interesting example, but it is completely parallel to your pseudo-code, and we really did reach right into the already allocated memory and alter it, which is what you wanted to do.
This sort of thing gets a lot more interesting when what you want to do is something like cycle thru memory just as fast as doing pointer arithmetic in C.
I'm working with a C API from Swift and for one of the methods that I need to call I need to give a
UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>>>
More Info:
Swift Interface:
public func presage_predict(prsg: presage_t, _ result: UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>>>) -> presage_error_code_t
Original C:
presage_error_code_t presage_predict(presage_t prsg, char*** result);
Generally, if a function takes a UnsafePointer<T> parameter
then you can pass a variable of type T as in "inout" parameter with &. In your case, T is
UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>>
which is the Swift mapping of char **. So you can call the C function
as
var prediction : UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>> = nil
if presage_predict(prsg, &prediction) == PRESAGE_OK { ... }
From the documentation and sample code of the Presage library I
understand that this allocates an array of strings and assigns the
address of this array to the variable pointed to by prediction.
To avoid a memory leak, these strings have to be released eventually
with
presage_free_string_array(prediction)
To demonstrate that this actually works, I have taken the first
part of the demo code at presage_c_demo.c and translated it
to Swift:
// Duplicate the C strings to avoid premature deallocation:
let past = strdup("did you not sa")
let future = strdup("")
func get_past_stream(arg: UnsafeMutablePointer<Void>) -> UnsafePointer<Int8> {
return UnsafePointer(past)
}
func get_future_stream(arg: UnsafeMutablePointer<Void>) -> UnsafePointer<Int8> {
return UnsafePointer(future)
}
var prsg = presage_t()
presage_new(get_past_stream, nil, get_future_stream, nil, &prsg)
var prediction : UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>> = nil
if presage_predict(prsg, &prediction) == PRESAGE_OK {
for var i = 0; prediction[i] != nil; i++ {
// Convert C string to Swift `String`:
let pred = String.fromCString(prediction[i])!
print ("prediction[\(i)]: \(pred)")
}
presage_free_string_array(prediction)
}
free(past)
free(future)
This actually worked and produced the output
prediction[0]: say
prediction[1]: said
prediction[2]: savages
prediction[3]: saw
prediction[4]: sat
prediction[5]: same
There may be a better way but this runs in playground and defines a value r with the type you want:
func ptrFromAddress<T>(p:UnsafeMutablePointer<T>) -> UnsafeMutablePointer<T>
{
return p
}
var myInt:Int8 = 0
var p = ptrFromAddress(&myInt)
var q = ptrFromAddress(&p)
var r = ptrFromAddress(&q)
What's the point of defining ptrFromAddress, which seems like it does nothing? My thinking is that the section of the Swift interop book which discusses mutable pointers shows many ways to initialize them by passing some expression as an argument (like &x), but does not seem to show corresponding ways where you simply call UnsafeMutablePointer's initializer. So let's define a no-op function just to use those special initialization methods based on argument-passing
Update:
While I believe the method above is correct, it was pointed out by #alisoftware in another forum that this seems to be a safer and more idiomatic way to do the same thing:
var myInt: Int8 = 0
withUnsafeMutablePointer(&myInt) { (var p) in
withUnsafeMutablePointer(&p) { (var pp) in
withUnsafeMutablePointer(&pp) { (var ppp) in
// Do stuff with ppp which is a UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>>>
}
}
}
It's more idiomatic because you're using the function withUnsafeMutablePointer which is supplied by the Swift standard library, rather than defining your own helper. It's safer because you are guaranteed that the UnsafeMutablePointer is only alive during the extent of the call to the closure (so long as the closure itself does not store the pointer).
I've got some Swift 2.0 code, for which I'm trying to achieve 100% code coverage. I'm doing some JSON handling, part of which looks like so:
guard let jsonData = jsonText.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding) else {
throw ErrorCode.JSONEncodingFailure
}
I don't think there's a real-world case in which any string can't be encoded as UTF-8, but I don't want to open myself up to a crashing error either, so that code must remain. How can I mock the jsonText object to return nil for dataUsingEncoding()?
The closest I've come is to subclass NSString like so:
public class BadString: NSString {
public override var length: Int {
get {
return 5
}
}
public override func characterAtIndex(index: Int) -> unichar {
return 0
}
public override func dataUsingEncoding(encoding: NSStringEncoding) -> NSData? {
return nil
}
}
Here's the problem, though. In order for my mock implementation to be used, I have to define jsonText (a function parameter) as an NSString, rather than String, which feels wrong for an all-Swift codebase. With it defined as a Swift String, I have to cast my BadString to that type, and it uses the String implementation instead of my own.
Is there another (clean) way to achieve this?
You will be hard-pressed to find a string that cannot be encoded using UTF-8! As long as you know that is the encoding you will be using, I would suggest that you not worry about testing the "encoding failure" case.
However, if you still desire to test it then I recommend making one of the following changes in order to allow you to do so:
(1) change the way you are thinking about the 'failure': if you know that the string you are encoding will always be non-empty, then broaden the guard to also require that the encoded data has length > 0, e.g. =>
guard let jsonData = jsonText.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)
where jsonData.length > 0 else {
throw ErrorCode.JSONEncodingFailure
}
...using this idea, you can now use an empty string for jsonText and trigger this code path (assuming that an empty string would also satisfy your definition of 'failure' here)
(2) store your string encoding value in a variable (let's call it stringEncoding) that you can access during your test setup, and then test this using incompatible values for jsonText and stringEncoding, e.g. =>
var jsonText = "🙈"
let stringEncoding = NSASCIIStringEncoding
...I guarantee that jsonText.dataUsingEncoding(stringEncoding) will return nil in this case :)
Happy Testing! I hope this helps!
I'm working with a third party c API I'm trying to call one of the functions with a simple string. Something like this:
some_c_func("aString");
I get a build error:
Type 'UnsafeMutablePointer<char_t>' does not conform to protocol 'StringLiteralConvertible'
I've seen some suggestions to use utf8 on String or similar conversions, which gets nearly there, but with the following error:
some_c_func("aString".cStringUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding));
'UnsafePointer<Int8>' is not convertible to 'UnsafeMutablePointer<char_t>'
How can I create an UnsafeMutablePointer?
It all depends on what char_t is.
If char_t converts to Int8 then the following will work.
if let cString = str.cStringUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding) {
some_c_func(strdup(cString))
}
This can be collapsed to
some_c_func(strdup(str.cStringUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)!))
WARNING! This second method will cause a crash if func cStringUsingEncoding(_:) returns nil.
Updating for Swift 3, and to fix memory leak
If the C string is only needed in a local scope, then no strdup() is needed.
guard let cString = str.cString(using: .utf8) else {
return
}
some_c_func(cString)
cString will have the same memory lifecycle as str (well similar at least).
If the C string needs to live outside the local scope, then you will need a copy. That copy will need to be freed.
guard let interimString = str.cString(using: .utf8), let cString = strdup(interimString) else {
return
}
some_c_func(cString)
//…
free(cString)
it may be simpler than that - many C APIs pass strings around as char * types, and swift treats these as unsafe.
try updating the C API (good) or hack it's header files (bad) to declare these as const char * instead.
in my experience this allows you to pass standard swift String types directly to the C API.
apparently a constant is required, in order to conform to the protocol.
I haven't tried passing strings like that, but I have a C function that I call from Swift, that takes a lot more parameters than shown here, among which is a reference to a Swift C typecast buffer to hold an error string. The compiler doesn't complain and the function call works. Hopefully this will steer you closer to the answer and you can provide an update with the final answer or someone else can.
var err = [CChar](count: 256, repeatedValue: 0)
var rv = somefunc((UnsafeMutablePointer<Int8>)(err))
if (rv < 0) {
println("Error \(err)")
return
}
I am trying to use dispatch_queue_create with a dynamic String that I am creating at runtime as the first parameter. The compiler complains because it expects a standard c string. If I switch this to a compile time defined string the error goes away. Can anyone tell me how to convert a String to a standard c string?
You can get a CString as follows:
import Foundation
var str = "Hello, World"
var cstr = str.bridgeToObjectiveC().UTF8String
EDIT: Beta 5 Update - bridgeToObjectiveC() no longer exists (thanks #Sam):
var cstr = (str as NSString).UTF8String
There is also String.withCString() which might be more appropriate, depending on your use case. Sample:
var buf = in_addr()
let s = "17.172.224.47"
s.withCString { cs in inet_pton(AF_INET, cs, &buf) }
Update Swift 2.2: Swift 2.2 automagically bridges String's to C strings, so the above sample is now a simple:
var buf = in_addr()
let s = "17.172.224.47"
net_pton(AF_INET, s, &buf)
Much easier ;->
Swift bridges String and NSString. I believe this may be possible alternative to Cezary's answer:
import Foundation
var str = "Hello World"
var cstr = str.cStringUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)
The API documentation:
/* Methods to convert NSString to a NULL-terminated cString using the specified
encoding. Note, these are the "new" cString methods, and are not deprecated
like the older cString methods which do not take encoding arguments.
*/
func cStringUsingEncoding(encoding: UInt) -> CString // "Autoreleased"; NULL return if encoding conversion not possible; for performance reasons, lifetime of this should not be considered longer than the lifetime of the receiving string (if the receiver string is freed, this might go invalid then, before the end of the autorelease scope)
Swift 3 version as #mbeaty's say:
import Foundation
var str = "Hello World"
var cstr = str.cString(using: String.Encoding.utf8)
Apple API:
Foundation > String > cString(using:)
Instance Method
cString(using:)
Returns a representation of the String as a C string using a given encoding.
Swift 5
var cstr = (userStr as NSString).utf8String
Swift 5
Remember to guarantee the lifetime, like:
let myVariable: String = "some text...";
withExtendedLifetime(myVariable) {
myVariable.utf8CString.withUnsafeBufferPointer { buffer in
let result = buffer.baseAddress!;
// ... Do something with result
}
}