Asking for Help/Why do I see b’string’ when i print a c_char_p string?

Legacy Wiki Page

This page was migrated from the old MoinMoin-based wiki. Information may be outdated or no longer applicable. For current documentation, see python.org.

Asking for Help: …

…

I was trying to use ctypes to get Windows clipboard contents and the value that gets returned is a ctypes.c_char_p string. When I print it the string looks like b’contents_of_clipboard’. I am not sure why this happens or how to get rid of it. anyone know. The code that I pilfered from the net to do this is below

   1 import ctypes, sys
   2 
   3 def winGetClipboard():
   4         ctypes.windll.user32.OpenClipboard(0)
   5         pcontents = ctypes.windll.user32.GetClipboardData(1) # 1 is CF_TEXT
   6         data = ctypes.c_char_p(pcontents).value
   7         ctypes.windll.user32.CloseClipboard()
   8         return data

If I had Hello World on the clipboard the returned output would be b’Hello World’

When answering questions, add the CategoryAskingForHelpAnswered category when saving the page. This will move the link to this page from the questions section to the answers section on the Asking for Help page.

---

CategoryAskingForHelp