What is a wrapper

[Anon]

What is a wrapper

[[deleted]]

It's a piece of paper covering items of a choclaty nature, usually printed in a cheerfull design with bright colors.

...or maybe you should be a little more specific?

[Anon]

Ok Ok I get it

I seen an artical on a script the author said he didn't have time to write a wrapper for it.

I was woundering what he meant by wrapper

[james2010]

I'd assume he ment it as a way of wrapping text, though I may be wrong.

[Anon]

A wrapper is a piece of code that you write around another piece of code to make it usefull in more situations:

Say I for instance want to add a certain string to all the lines I print. (i know this is silly but it does explain it)

I could do the folowing:

$theStringIAdd = "send me money"

echo "bla bla bla" . $theStringIAdd;

echo "bla2 bla2 bla2" . $theStringIAdd;

and so forth.

I could also write a wraper function:

funtion wrapperEcho($string)
{
echo $string . "send me money";
}

Which would make it possible for me to write the above this way:

wrapperEcho ("bla bla bla");

wrapperEcho ("bla2 bla2 bla2");

---

I hope this explained it.
-christian

[[deleted]]

Still could mean several things, but the most common meaning is that it acts as a shell around the target script, enabling you to talk to the 'wrapper' in your own way, and having the wrapper talk to the target script. That way you can add all kinds of functionality to the target script without changing the script itself. Need different funtions? just replace the wrapper.

[zalath]

I think the most common wrapper is a function library, for example in windows programming, the library provides a means to access a .dll file that contains the actual file. So if you have a .dll and no way to access the functionality in it (in your chosen language), you'd write a wrapper.