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Can python take in a C array (from a file) and does some processing on it? For example, say I have a C header containing:

static char bin[] = {...}; // whole bunch of hex values

Can I write a python script to count how many bytes are there in the array? The reason I want to do this is I have about ~100 of these headers and some of them have the same array names, so I can't include all of these and sizeof each one.
Any suggestion on what should I look into? Doesn't have to be python but I feel like this is the right tool.

Thanks!

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2 Answers 2

up vote 0 down vote

This Perl one-liner may help, if array initializers do not span multi-lines:

perl -lne '($p)=($_=~/static char bin\[\] = \{([^}]*)\}/) and
      $p=~s/[^,]*//g; print length($p)' input.h
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unfortunately they do.. they're about several hundreds lines each, but thanks anyways I could try to tweak this a little bit –  lzt May 31 '13 at 17:01
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Here's an attempt at a python version:

If the values in each array are comma separated, you could try the following:

import glob

#get all the headers in the current directory
headers = glob.glob("*.h")

for header in headers:
    fp = open(header, "r")
    for line in fp.readlines():
        if line.startswith("static char"):
            bits = line.split(",")
            count = len(bits)-1
            print "Found array starting %s"%bits[0]
            print "containing %d bytes"%count
            print "in file %s"%header

This makes a few assumptions like the comma separation, and just prints out what it finds - what you do with the information is up to you - this wasn't clear in the question

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I guess, regular expression will be better here. Your solution will fail for static char function(), static char b[] = {1, 2, 3} /* , , */ and multiline definitions. Also your solution gives incorrect output for static char b[] = {1, 2, 3}; - containing 2 bytes. –  soon May 31 '13 at 2:08

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