I need to read strings written by multiprocessing.Process instances from the main process. I already use Managers and queues to pass arguments to processes, so using the Managers seems obvious, but Managers do not support strings:
A manager returned by Manager() will support types list, dict,
Namespace, Lock, RLock, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore, Condition, Event,
Queue, Value and Array.
How do I share state represented by a string using Managers from the multiprocessing module?
multiprocessing's Managers can hold Values which in turn can hold instances of the type c_char_p from the ctypes module:
>>> import multiprocessing
>>> import ctypes
>>> v = multiprocessing.Value('c', "Hello, World!")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/multiprocessing/__init__.py", line 253, in Value
return Value(typecode_or_type, *args, **kwds)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/multiprocessing/sharedctypes.py", line 99, in Value
obj = RawValue(typecode_or_type, *args)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/multiprocessing/sharedctypes.py", line 73, in RawValue
obj.__init__(*args)
TypeError: one character string expected
>>> cstring = multiprocessing.Value(ctypes.c_char_p, "Hello, World!")
>>> cstring
<Synchronized wrapper for c_char_p(166841564)>
>>> cstring.value
'Hello, World!'
See also: Post with the original solution that I had a hard time finding.
So a Manager can be used to share a string beneath multiple processes in Python like this:
>>> from multiprocessing import Process, Manager, Value
>>> from ctypes import c_char_p
>>>
>>> def greet(string):
>>> string.value = string.value + ", World!"
>>>
>>> if __name__ == '__main__':
>>> manager = Manager()
>>> string = manager.Value(c_char_p, "Hello")
>>> process = Process(target=greet, args=(string,))
>>> process.start()
>>> process.join()
>>> print string.value
'Hello, World!'
Simply put the string in a dict
:
d = manager.dict()
d['state'] = 'xyz'
As strings themselves are immutable, sharing one directly would not be as useful.