The MUSCLE Python API closely resembles the C api but is slightly more brief. Currently, only Python 2.x is supported. It is enabled by default on the latest version of MUSCLE, and can be forced to be enabled by setting

$ cd [MUSCLE_SRC]/build
$ export MUSCLE_BUILD_OPTIONS="-DBUILD_PYTHON=ON"
$ ./build.sh [MUSCLE_INSTALL_DIR]

It will then be built as the Python module. By doing

$ source [MUSCLE_INSTALL_DIR]/etc/muscle.profile

it gets included in the Python module path. The latest information about the module can always be found by doing

$ python
import muscle
help(muscle)

The API includes the following functions:

muscle.init(sys.argv)
muscle.finalize()

muscle.send(portName, data, [muscle.datatype])
muscle.receive(portName, [muscle.datatype])

muscle.will_stop()
muscle.kernel_name()
muscle.tmp_path()
muscle.has_property(propName)
muscle.get_property(propName)

muscle.log(msg)
muscle.fine(msg)
muscle.warning(msg)
muscle.severe(msg)

These functions behave just like their C++ counterparts, except init, send and receive. For init, first run import sys and then muscle.init(sys.argv). Send will accept a sequence of objects, given a muscle datatype. The following datatypes are recognized: |= Object |= Python data type |= C data type | | muscle.int | sequence of int | 32-bit int | | muscle.long | sequence of int | 64-bit long | | muscle.float | sequence of double | 32-bit float | | muscle.double | sequence of double | 64-bit double | | muscle.boolean | sequence of bool | bool | | muscle.raw | bytearray | char * | | muscle.string | str | const char * |

The first five data types take any sequence, as long as the Python datatype that is contained matches. In some cases, it may be necessary to recreate a NumPy? array so that the canonical Python datatypes are used. For example, with int:

import numpy as np
import muscle

data = np.zeros(100, np.int)
muscle.send([int(d) for d in data], 'out', muscle.int)