PyBind11: binding a function that uses double pointers

Question

I would like to bind a C++-function with PyBind11. The problem is that this functions has an argument with a double pointer and the compiler raises an error

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Answer 1

For non-simple argument types (e.g. like your char **) you'll have to wrap the function itself, where your wrapper provides the logic to go from a simpler type or a Python object to the desired type.

In this case, char * are actually a pretty unsafe type to work with, since it doesn't get memory cleanup; to make this work robustly you'll need to take std::strings, from which you can then access the char * via the c_str() method. (In pybind11, even when you take char * arguments, those are really just pointers into std::string arguments: the Python API deliberately doesn't let callers access the internal storage of Python strings).

So then you just want to combine it with a type that can itself expose the whole thing as a char **, which is pretty much what std::vector is designed to do. Here's a wrapper that would fit your example code:

#include <pybind11/stl.h>

m.def("parse_args", [](std::vector<std::string> args) {
    std::vector<char *> cstrs;
    cstrs.reserve(args.size());
    for (auto &s : args) cstrs.push_back(const_cast<char *>(s.c_str()));
    return parse_args(cstrs.size(), cstrs.data());
});

(If your parse_args actually takes a const char ** you can drop the const_cast).