Python String to BSTR

Question

I am Using the iTunes COM interface on windows 7. The method iTunes.CurrentTrack.AddArtworkFromFile(path) requires path to be of type BSTR.

I understand from some research that BSTR is a C++/Visual Basic data type that means basic string.

Is there any way of converting python ascii strings to BSTR?

code :

import urllib
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import re
import win32com.client
import sys





iTunes = win32com.client.gencache.EnsureDispatch("iTunes.Application")

cTrackName = iTunes.CurrentTrack.Name
cArtist = iTunes.CurrentTrack.Artist
cAlbum = iTunes.CurrentTrack.Album

print cAlbum + cArtist + cTrackName
url = 'http://www.last.fm/music/'+cArtist+'/'+cAlbum
albumPage = urllib.urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(albumPage)
s =  soup.prettify()
z = re.compile('.*<img  width="174" src="(.*)" class="art"  id="albumCover" itemprop="image" class="albumCover coverMega"  />')
p = re.findall(z,s)
print p
urllib.urlretrieve(p[0],'a.png')
a = urllib.quote('file://localhost/C:/Users/ArchAngel/Desktop/a.png')
iTunes.CurrentTrack.AddArtworkFromFile('file://localhost/C:/Users/ArchAngel/Desktop/a.png')
#print binascii.a2b_uu('sadsaffas')
iTunes.CurrentTrack.AddArtworkFromFile(b'C:\Users\ArchAngel\Desktop\a.png')

Error : pywintypes.com_error: (-2147352567, 'Exception occurred.', (0, None, None, None, 0, -2147467259), None)

Answer 1

Since you are using Python 2.x, I believe you simply need to use unicode rather than str and win32com will do the rest. However, I would have expected win32com to automatically convert str to unicode for you.

You should write it like this:

iTunes.CurrentTrack.AddArtworkFromFile(u'file://localhost/C:/Users/ArchAngel/Desktop/a.png')

If this does not work then I think your problem lies elsewhere.