Void Pointers Don't Adapt Well To Python

Having written a C function that returned a ​void pointer, I attempted to import it into Python using ​SWIG. Unfortunately, when asked to return the value of a SWIGged C pointer Python returns a string containing the object's memory address. ​SWIG and ​Python both describe options for dealing with this, but the SWIG documentation appears to be out of date and the Python options are either too complicated or require a more advanced version than the 2.3 build we use on nova and orda.

The solution in my case was just to write adapter functions in the C module that converted the ​void pointer output into standard non-pointer datatypes. I was using void pointers to avoid writing multiple functions that returned different datatypes, but the Chombo HDF format uses a small number of relatively simple datatypes, so I was able to circumvent the entire problem with three short conversion wrappers.