Benoit wrote: > I understand that the Win32 has been said to be itself poorly > documented, so perhaps that the documentation that comes with the > modules is of similar quality is no coincidence. Maybe I'm still too > young in my programming to grasp the good of that documentation, but > for myself, it tells me next to nothing. Could anyone point me to > anything which may exist that does a better job of explaining the > extensions' use? I tried to take a look @ Microsoft's documentation, > but it was confusing.
I think the thing is that, for most of the modules, they're simply answering the question "How do I do <x> in Python?" where <x> is the answer to the question "How do I do <y> in Windows?". For example: "How do I send something to a printer in Windows?". If you Google around a bit with that, you'll end up with things like OpenPrinter, StartDocPrinter and so on. With a Vb/Delphi/C++ example in hand, the pywin32 extensions usually make it possible to translate pretty much directly into Python. Obviously, the modules are more-or-less hand-coded/generated so only whatever someone's[*] seen fit to include are included (and development continues so new things do turn up). The more general solution is ctypes, standard with Py2.5+, available as an extension before that. That's even lower level, but does mean that if something isn't exposed via pywin32 then you can do-it-yourself. All this isn't really answering your question but is at least explaining a bit why "explaining the extensions' use" is perhaps a trivial task - they're there to expose the Microsoft API in a slightly more Pythonic layer. There are a few web pages around with a few hints and recipes, my own included: http://timgolden.me.uk/python/win32_how_do_i.html Ultimately, though, you're at the mercy of the MS API unless someone's already done the legwork of providing a more Pythonic wrapper to something. TJG [*] And "someone" here means the selfless small team, mostly consisting of Mark Hammond and Roger Upole, who've contributed over the years. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
