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Ctypes unions with bitfield members that do not share memory #83211
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OhSoDank commented
on Dec 12, 2019 OhSoDankmannequinMannequinAuthorI've found what looks like a corner case bug. Specifically, the behaviour that looks suspicious is when a ctypes union has bit field members, where the members have bit widths that are smaller than the size types:
class BitFieldUnion(Union): _fields_ = [("a", c_uint32, 16), ("b", c_uint32, 16)] buff = bytearray(4) bitfield_union = BitFieldUnion.from_buffer(buff) bitfield_union.a = 1 bitfield_union.b = 2 print("a is {}".format(bitfield_union.a)) # Prints "a is 1" print("b is {}".format(bitfield_union.b)) # Prints "b is 2" print("Buffer: {}".format(buff)) # Prints "Buffer: b'\x01\x00\x00\x00'".
(Example of this script can be found at https://rextester.com/XJFGAK37131. I've also tried it on my system which is Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS with Python 3.6.)
Here I would expect both 'a' and 'b' to be set to 2, and for the buffer to look like '\x02\x00\x00\x00'. Here's the equivalent code in C which behaves as expected: https://rextester.com/HWDUMB56821.
If at least one of the bitwidths in the above example are changed from 16 to 32, however, then 'a', 'b', and the buffer look as expected.
I've also attached some further examples of weird behaviour with unions with bitfield members - online version can be found at https://rextester.com/VZRB77320.
Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.
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