SEGV when printing non-existing antenna item in python about six-library HOT 3 CLOSED

What's going on here is that under the hood, antenna (and most (all?) optional fields) gets stored as a smart pointer. So for now, you can work around this with an explicit check for None. e.g.

if mdata.antenna.get() is not None:
    print mdata.antenna.numRcvAnt

@asylvest I think I could do something like this to make the pointer wrappers more Python friendly. The downside there is that I'd have to manually attach it to each type. There's a small chance of magic-ing it all away with reflection, if I have time to experiment.

from six-library.

Yeah the crux of it, as @JonathanMeans is driving at, is that in the underlying C++ API, we treat optional parameters as NULL... in the C++ if you're trying to see if an optional field is present, you check if a pointer is NULL. We generate the Python layer via Swig, so this carries over directly.

We're currently looking into a couple options for making the Python layer more friendly / Pythonic...

from six-library.

OK, cool. Let me know if you want me to test anything

from six-library.