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))
}
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)
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)