Python Programming On Win32

Overlapped I/O

Windows provides a number of techniques for high-performance file I/O. The most common is overlapped I/O. Using overlapped I/O, the win32file.ReadFile() and win32file.WriteFile() operations are asynchronous and return before the actual I/O operation has completed. When the I/O operation finally completes, a Windows event is signaled.

Overlapped I/O does have some requirements normal I/O operations don’t:

• The operating system doesn’t automatically advance the file pointer. When not using overlapped I/O, a ReadFile or WriteFile operation automatically advances the file pointer, so the next operation automatically reads the subsequent data in the file. When using overlapped I/O, you must manage the location in the file manually.

• The standard technique of returning a Python string object from win32file.ReadFile() doesn’t work. Because the I/O operation has not completed when the call returns, a Python string can’t be used.

As you can imagine, the code for performing overlapped I/O is more complex than when performing synchronous I/O. Chapter 18, contains some sample code that uses basic overlapped I/O on a Windows-named pipe.