I'm trying to help my son with a Programming C++ for Engineers course. I got him set up with Xcode 13.1 on his iMac but I've never used it myself. That was working great until his first assignment that required writing output to a file. We created a new Command Line Tool project and then used the File->New->File... option to create an Empty file. After doing so, selecting that file and looking at the info on the right side of the window shows that the Full Path is pointing to the directory where his main.cpp file is. Yet, when running his code nothing was being written to the file. I had assumed that just referencing the file name in his code would cause it to use a local reference and look in the same directory as main.cpp. After much Googling I found a reference that said to go to Product->Scheme->Edit Scheme... then select the Options tab in the window that opens and change the Working Directory from "$(BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR)" to the directory containing the main.cpp file. That got the programming working correctly. My questions are:
Is there a preference setting that would tell it to always use the current project directory so that we don't have to change this every time?
Where does "$(BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR)" point to?
What should we be doing differently?
I've got a problem with compiling my basic code with MOOS-ivp.
I made main.cpp, simpleApp.cpp and simpleApp.h from documentation, where should I put it to build it with moos? In docs there is note about launching MOOSDB and uMS - ok, but there is not any option to find path to my .cpp file. Is there any default path? Maybe should I compile it firstly with gcc?
I'll assume you know some basic information about MOOS or are taking the MIT 2.680 course and know some of the terminology talked about in the introduction lab.
The recommended way to build external MOOS is to have moos-ivp and moos-ivp-extend in a directory next to each other. You should run GenMOOSApp_AppCasting in the moos-ivp-extend/src directory and add your new project to the CMakeLists.txt file in the same directory. Then, use the included ./build.sh script to build your executables, and add the directory it makes to your $PATH.
Finally, you should be able to run your mission with your new MOOS app.
I'm ashamed for not being able to solve this but i can't make this work. I have this brief test:
std::string archnom = "../data/uniform.txt";
ifstream archin(archnom.c_str());
ASSERT(archin.good());
The assert is throwing error. For some reason it's not locating the uniform.txt file. The project structure is:
project
---> data/uniform.txt
---> a.out
---> main.txt
I've already tried changing archnom as follows without success:
std::string archnom = "/data/uniform.txt";
std::string archnom = "./data/uniform.txt";
std::string archnom = "../data/uniform.txt";
std::string archnom = "data/uniform.txt";
What is the problem here?
In a terminal, you can type ./build/a.out to launch the a.out program with ./ as the current working directory.
When you do this, relative filepaths that are used in your program are relative to the ./ dir -- not the one which contains the program.
For example, if I want to open ex.txt when running ./build/a.out (and ex.txt is in the same directory as build), my program should have the relative path ./ex.txt - not ../ex.txt.
std::string archnom = "../data/uniform.txt";
Tells the program that uniform.txt can be found by going back one directory and then up into data.
But in what directory does the program start looking? Good question. That location is called the Working Directory, and unfortunately it MOVES. Typically the working directory starts as the directory the program is run from, not where the program is. For added excitement your program can change the working directory while running.
So if your program is at /home/bob/code and the uniform.txt file is at /home/bob/data and you run the program from /home/bob/code with ./program all is good. The working directory is /home/bob/code and the program goes back one folder and then up into data.
What if you were in /home/bob/workspace and you ran ../code/program. The working directory is /home/bob/workspace and the program goes back one folder and into data.
But what if you run the program from / with /home/bob/code/program? The working directory is /. You can't really go back anywhere, can you?
Let's try a less extreme case: /etc. Program goes back to / and forward to... rats. No data directory.
If the uniform.txt file is always going to be in the same place and this place is guaranteed, use a fixed path. If uniform.txt is going to be somewhere near the installation directory of the program, your program needs to know where it is and that takes OS specific code.
You need to make sure the current working directory is where you expect it to be. You can do that by using _chdir (win32) or chdir (gcc) and by using argv[0] (which contains the path to the currently running executable).
I showed how to do this in my answer to another question here :
Change the current working directory in C++
I tried to work with the boost library to read/write configuration files but I just don't get it.
I even can't run the example code from boost.org (5 Minute Tutorial)
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_49_0/libs/property_tree/examples/debug_settings.cpp
I've downloaded the boost_1_49_0.zip package and unzipped it to my c++ program folder. The code compiles (TheIDE - U++) but it always says "Error: debug_settings.xml: cannot open file" which basically means that the program works, but runs into the exception.
I didn't change the code, I just copy and pasted it to get a working example which I could try to understand then. But I don't even get this one to work. (Since it's exactly the same as in the link, I don't paste the code here... unless you think it's better.)
Please help me... or point to a different way to store variables in a file with some kind of structure (I wan't to learn a way that works for windows and linux, because some of my apps are cross-platform.)
Thanks.
EDIT: debug_settings.xml is in the same folder as the .cpp file
EDIT2: Working now, the debug_settings.xml is now in the folder where the executable is stored. (in my case, U++/TheIDE it's C:\upp\out\MyApps\MINGW.Debug.Debug_Full.Sse2 for debugging)
The configuration file would need to be in the working directory of the executable when it's running.
I am attempting to put together a simple c++ test project that uses an embedded python 3.2 interpreter. The project builds fine but Py_Initialize raises a fatal error:
Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: unable to load the file system codec
LookupError: no codec search functions registered: can't find encoding
Minimal code:
#include <Python.h>
int main (int, char**)
{
Py_Initialize ();
Py_Finalize ();
return 0;
}
The OS is 32bit Vista.
The python version used is a python 3.2 debug build, built from sources using VC++ 10.
The python_d.exe file from the same build runs without any problems.
Could someone explain the problem and how to fix it? My own google-fu fails me.
EDIT 1
After going through the python source code I've found that, as the error says, no codec search functions have been registered. Both codec_register and PyCodec_Register are as they should be. It's just that nowhere in the code are any of these functions called.
I don't really know what this means as I still have no idea when and from where these functions should have been called. The code that raises the error is entirely missing from the source of my other python build (3.1.3).
EDIT 2
Answered my own question below.
Check the PYTHONPATH and PYTHONHOME environment variables and make sure they don't point to Python 2.x.
http://bugs.python.org/issue11288
Parts of this have been mentioned before, but in a nutshell this is what worked for my environment where I have multiple Python installs and my global OS environment set-up to point to a different install than the one I attempt to work with when encountering the problem.
Make sure your (local or global) environment is fully set-up to point to the install you aim to work with, e.g. you have two (or more) installs of, let's say a python27 and python33 (sorry these are windows paths but the following should be valid for equivalent UNIX-style paths just as well, please let me know about anything I'm missing here (probably the DLLs path might differ)):
C:\python27_x86
C:\python33_x64
Now, if you intend to work with your python33 install but your global environment is pointing to python27, make sure you update your environment as such (while PATH and PYTHONHOME may be optional (e.g. if you temporarily work in a local shell)):
PATH="C:\python33_x64;%PATH%"
PYTHONPATH="C:\python33_x64\DLLs;C:\python33_x64\Lib;C:\python33_x64\Lib\site-packages"
PYTHONHOME=C:\python33_x64
Note, that you might need/want to append any other library paths to your PYTHONPATH if required by your development environment, but having your DLLs, Lib and site-packages properly set-up is of prime importance.
Hope this helps.
The core reason is quite simple: Python does not find its modules directory, so it can of course not load encodings, too
Python doc on embedding says "Py_Initialize() calculates the module search path based upon its best guess" ... "In particular, it looks for a directory named lib/pythonX.Y"
Yet, if the modules are installed in (just) lib - relative to the python binary - above guess is wrong.
Although docs says that PYTHONHOME and PYTHONPATH are regarded, we observed that this was not the case; their actual presence or content was completely irrelevant.
The only thing that had an effect was a call to Py_SetPath() with e.g. [path-to]\lib as argument before Py_Initialize().
Sure this is only an option for an embedding scenario where one has direct access and control over the code; with a ready-made solution, special steps may be necessary to solve the issue.
Ran into the same thing trying to install brew's python3 under Mac OS! The issue here is that in Mac OS, homebrew puts the "real" python a whole layer deeper than you think. You would think from the homebrew output that
$ echo $PYTHONHOME
/usr/local/Cellar/python3/3.6.2/
$ echo $PYTHONPATH
/usr/local/Cellar/python3/3.6.2/bin
would be correct, but invoking $PYTHONPATH/python3 immediately crashes with the abort 6 "can't find encodings." This is because although that $PYTHONHOME looks like a complete installation, having a bin, lib etc, it is NOT the actual Python, which is in a Mac OS "Framework". Do this:
PYTHONHOME=/usr/local/Cellar/python3/3.x.y/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.x
PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONHOME/bin
(substituting version numbers as appropriate) and it will work fine.
From python3k, the startup need the encodings module, which can be found in PYTHONHOME\Lib directory.
In fact, the API Py_Initialize () do the init and import the encodings module.
Make sure PYTHONHOME\Lib is in sys.path and check the encodings module is there.
I had this issue with python 3.5, anaconda 3, windows 7 32 bit. I solved it by moving my pythonX.lib and pythonX.dll files into my working directory and calling
Py_SetPythonHome(L"C:\\Path\\To\\My\\Python\\Installation");
before initialize so that it could find the headers that it needed, where my path was to "...\Anaconda3\". The extra step of calling Py_SetPythonHome was required for me or else I'd end up getting other strange errors where python import files.
I just ran into the exact same problem (same Python version, OS, code, etc).
You just have to copy Python's Lib/ directory in your program's working directory ( on VC it's the directory where the .vcproj is )
There appears to be something going wrong with the release build either failing to include the appropriate codecs or else misidentifying the codec to use for system APIs. Since the python_d executable is working, what does that return for os.getfsencoding()? (Use the C API to call that between your Initialize/Finalize calls)
I had the same issue and found this question. However from the answers here I was not able to solve my problem. I started debugging the cpython code and thought that I might be discovered a bug. Therefore I opened a issue on the python issue tracker.
My mistake was that I did not understand that Py_SetPath clears all inferred paths.
So one needs to set all paths when calling this function.
Link to the issue conversation
For completion I also copied the most important part of the conversation below.
My original issue text
I compiled the source of CPython 3.7.3 myself on Windows with Visual Studio 2017 together with some packages like e.g numpy. When I start the Python Interpreter I am able to import and use numpy. However when I am running the same script via the C-API I get an ModuleNotFoundError.
So the first thing I did, was to check if numpy is in my site-packages directory and indeed there is a folder named numpy-1.16.2-py3.7-win-amd64.egg. (Makes sense because the python interpreter can find numpy)
The next thing I did was to get some information about the sys.path variable created when running the script via the C-API.
#### sys.path content ####
C:\Work\build\product\python37.zip
C:\Work\build\product\DLLs
C:\Work\build\product\lib
C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)\MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO\2017\PROFESSIONAL\COMMON7\IDE\EXTENSIONS\TESTPLATFORM
C:\Users\rvq\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python37\site-packages
Examining the content of sys.path I noticed two things.
C:\Work\build\product\python37.zip has the correct path 'C:\Work\build\product\'. There was just no zip file. All my files and directory were unpacked. So I zipped the files to an archive named python37.zip and this resolved the import error.
C:\Users\rvq\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python37\site-packages is wrong it should be C:\Work\build\product\Lib\site-packages but I dont know how this wrong path is created.
The next thing I tried was to use Py_SetPath(L"C:/Work/build/product/Lib/site-packages") before calling Py_Initialize(). This led to
Fatal Python Error 'unable to load the file system encoding'
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'
I created a minimal c++ project with exact these two calls and started to debug Cpython.
int main()
{
Py_SetPath(L"C:/Work/build/product/Lib/site-packages");
Py_Initialize();
}
I tracked the call of Py_Initialize() down to the call of
static int
zipimport_zipimporter___init___impl(ZipImporter *self, PyObject *path)
inside of zipimport.c
The comment above this function states the following:
Create a new zipimporter instance. 'archivepath' must be a path-like
object to a zipfile, or to a specific path inside a zipfile. For
example, it can be '/tmp/myimport.zip', or
'/tmp/myimport.zip/mydirectory', if mydirectory is a valid directory
inside the archive. 'ZipImportError' is raised if 'archivepath'
doesn't point to a valid Zip archive. The 'archive' attribute of the
zipimporter object contains the name of the zipfile targeted.
So for me it seems that the C-API expects the path set with Py_SetPath to be a path to a zipfile. Is this expected behaviour or is it a bug?
If it is not a bug is there a way to changes this so that it can also detect directories?
PS: The ModuleNotFoundError did not occur for me when using Python 3.5.2+, which was the version I used in my project before. I also checked if I had set any PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH environment variables but I did not see one of them on my system.
Answer
This is probably a documentation failure more than anything else. We're in the middle of redesigning initialization though, so it's good timing to contribute this feedback.
The short answer is that you need to make sure Python can find the Lib/encodings directory, typically by putting the standard library in sys.path. Py_SetPath clears all inferred paths, so you need to specify all the places Python should look. (The rules for where Python looks automatically are complicated and vary by platform, which is something I'm keen to fix.)
Paths that don't exist are okay, and that's the zip file. You can choose to put the stdlib into a zip, and it will be found automatically if you name it the default path, but you can also leave it unzipped and reference the directory.
A full walk through on embedding is more than I'm prepared to type on my phone. Hopefully that's enough to get you going for now.
I had the problem and was tinkering with different solutions mentioned here. Since I was running my project from Visual Studio, apparently, I needed to set the environment path inside Visual Studio and not the system path.
Adding a simple PYTHONHOME=PATH\TO\PYTHON\DIR in the project solution\properties\environment solved the problem.
For me this happened when I updated Python 64 bit from 3.6.4 to 3.6.5. It threw some error like "unable to extract python.dll. Do you have permissions."
Pycharm also failed to load interpreter, even though I reloaded it in settings. Running python command gave same error, with and without administrator mode.
Reason
There was error in installation of Python, include folder in python installation directory C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36 was missing
Reinstalling Python also dint solve the issue.(Not removal and install)
Solution
Uninstall Python and Install of Python again.
Because running installer was just extracting same files excluding include folder
In my cases, for windows, if you have multiple python versions installed, if PYTHONPATH is pointing to one version the other ones didn't work. I found that if you just remove PYTHONPATH, they all work fine
For those working in Visual Studio simply add the include, Lib and libs directories to the Include Directories and Library Directories under
Projects Properties -> Configuration Properties > VC++ Directories :
For example I have Anaconda3 on my system and working with Visual Studio 2015 This is how the settings looks like (note the Include and Library directories) :
Edit:
As also pointed out by bossi setting PYTHONPATH in your user Environment Variables section seems necessary.
a sample input can be like this (in my case):
C:\Users\Master\Anaconda3\Lib;C:\Users\Master\Anaconda3\libs;C:\Users\Master\Anaconda3\Lib\site-packages;C:\Users\Master\Anaconda3\DLLs
is necessary it seems.
Also, you need to restart Visual Studio after you set up the PYTHONPATH in your user Environment Variables for the changes to take effect.
Also note that :
Make sure the PYTHONHOME environment variable is set to the Python
interpreter you want to use. The C++ projects in Visual Studio rely on
this variable to locate files such as python.h, which are used when
creating a Python extension.
So, for some reason the python dll fails to locate the encodings module. The python.exe executable apparently finds it because it has the expected relative path. Modifying the search path works.
The reason for all of this? Don't know but at least it works. I highly suspect a typo on my part somewhere, that's usually the reason for odd bugs it seems.