Access memory address in python

python memory memory-address
Academia picture Academia · Nov 24, 2011 · Viewed 50.6k times · Source

My question is: How can I read the content of a memory address in python? example: ptr = id(7) I want to read the content of memory pointed by ptr. Thanks.

Answer

Mark Tolonen picture Mark Tolonen · Nov 24, 2011

Have a look at ctypes.string_at. Here's an example. It dumps the raw data structure of a CPython integer.

from ctypes import string_at
from sys import getsizeof

a = 0x7fff 
print(string_at(id(a),getsizeof(a)).hex())

Output:

0200000000000000d00fbeaafe7f00000100000000000000ff7f0000

Note that this works with the CPython implementation because id() happens to return the virtual memory address of a Python object, but this is not guaranteed by the Python language itself.

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