Check on a rostopic programatically?

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I've tried searching for this but have been unsuccessful so far.

Is it possible to see a topic's value, programatically? Basically, I need the functionality of rostopic echo, but I need to add it to my code.

It's a topic that I created myself, so I can't just create a client and call a service... And I also do not want to subscribe to the topic and create a callback function. I just want to know the topic's value at a given point in my code.

Is this possible?