#694 TypeError: 'str' does not support the buffer interface in ResourceUpdate

[dcortesi]

This occurs in PyInstaller when trying to update a Manifest. The version is pywin32-219.win-amd64-py3.4. The call is

win32api.UpdateResource(hdst, type_, name, data, language)

where hdst=63307784, type_=24, name=1, language=0 and data=

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
<assemblyIdentity name="PPQT2" processorArchitecture="amd64" type="win32"
version="1.0.0.0"/></assembly>'

The "str does not support the buffer interface" error is a very common Python3 problem, indicating passing a str to a file opened as raw bytes.

[Mark Hammond]

I don't quite follow - I expect you want to pass bytes rather than a string on py3k?

[dcortesi]

The point is, under Python 3, if the caller passes a str this error will be thrown. This would be a common mistake in code converted from Python 2. The PyInstaller maintainer agreed, yeah, the Windows API call this goes into, takes a void* type of input which should be passed as raw bytes. So not technically a bug for win32api.

But the error message is very unhelpful. It would be cool if your code did the equivalent of "if isinstance(arg, str): raise TypeError". It would make it easier to diagnose.