CTypes and Incomplete Types

Some days ago I was writing a DLL’s wrapper in ctypes and I came across of this typedef in the header file:

typedef struct _FILEHandle *FILEHandle;

To translate this definition into ctypes is pretty straight-forward (if you already know the solution :-) ). First of all, _FILEHandle is a forward declaration and the definition of the struct’s fields are not exposed in the header file. So this is obviously an Incomplete Type and we can declare a ctype’s like this:

class _FILEHandle(Structure):
    pass

Finally, FILEHandle is pointer to an instance of _FILEHandle so it will be declared like that:

FILEHandle = POINTER(_FILEHandle)