simple-ipc

Inter-process communication based on stdio

A simple python interface for inter-process communication, a way to asynchronously exchange data with external programs at runtime. The internal mechanism functions by writing data to stdout and reading from stdin using multi threading.

Installation

pip install simple-ipc

Usage

Import the module first:

• import ipc
• from ipc import Worker

Parameters

Worker(command, callback=None, start=True, verbose=False)

• command a path to an executable along with optional arguments

  • list: may include spaces
  • str: no support for spaces

• callback (optional) a function that is called after new data has been received

  • must take exactly one argument

• start (optional) start the worker automatically when created

• verbose (optional) print status messages

Examples

worker = Worker(['with space.exe', 'spaced arg'], start=False)

with Worker('program.exe', verbose=True) as worker:
    ...

Worker('path/to/program.exe arg', lambda data: print(data))

A worker object

All data will be converted to type str internally.

Methods

• start() starts the worker
• send(data) sends the data to the external process
• stop() initiates the termination of all threads and clears all data

Properties

• running indicates the status of the worker (read-only)
• data contains the most recent value (read-only)

Example program

from random import randint
from ipc import Worker

def process(data):
    if int(data) == 5:
        print('Process data...')

worker = Worker('program.exe', process)

while worker.running:
    number = randint(1, 10)
    worker.send(number)
    print(f'Data: {worker.data}')

More example code can be found here.