[pygccxml-development] How to return a std::vector<std::string> to Python

[<bf...@co...>]

Hi,

also after lengthy search on the net I could not find a working example for the following (probably common)  use case:

I would like to expose a C++ function to Python which has as result type 
    std::vector<std::string>

When invoking the exposed function from Python I get the message

  File "test.py", line 15, in <module>
    v = a.alias_to_account_list(al)
TypeError: No to_python (by-value) converter found for C++ type: std::vector<std::string, std::allocator<std::string> >

The function looks as follows:
  vector<string> alias_to_account_list(string ali="SAP") {
      set<string> accts = _tlib2->alias_to_account_list(ali);
      cerr << "alias '" << ali << "' expands to that many accounts::" << accts.size() << endl;
      copy(accts.begin(), accts.end(), ostream_iterator<string>(cerr, ","));
      vector<string> res;
      copy(accts.begin(), accts.end(), back_inserter(res));
      return res;
  }

What can I do? Is there a way to construct native Python objects? Interestingly my code works when I return
    std::vector<int>

In this case I can access the elements of the vector from python with the [] notation. The object is no native python array, however, which I would prefer.
I am only interested in return by value at this point, so I do not want to change the C++ vector from Python.

This is what I want to do in Python:

   for al in ["MAN","LHA","SIE25"]:
       v = a.alias_to_account_list(al)
       print "dir(v)= ",dir(v), len(v),v[0],v[1],v[2]

Any hints are appreciated,
Bernd