I want to call legacy c third party functions from python. I created a C api to make the function calls simpler. In my python file I tried to import the *.so for the api which links with the legacy code library. But I kept seeing a libxxx ( the legacy c library) not found error. I tried to import both ans still saw the same error. I then tried using ctypes, but get the error ctypes not found. Any suggestions ?
# python
Python 2.4.2 (#1, Apr 20 2012, 19:31:49)
[GCC 4.1.2 20070115 (SUSE Linux)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import ctypes
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
ImportError: No module named ctypes
>>> quit
ctypes only made it into the standard library in version 2.5, so 2.4 does not have it. I've also heard that some people exclude it when they build Python for a distribution or for embedding in a specific application, as you can easily crash your process using it, or even corrupt the host application's heap. But I have never encountered this myself, and I doubt a full installation does this.
As for not finding your C library, we'll need more details on that.