How to convert slot_types of messages to actual data types

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Hi All,

I am currently implementing a little python script that takes parameters for actions from a string and automatically populates an action goal to send it to the action server. The goal obviously defines all the correct message types like string, float64, etc. The problem is, that I read these params from a string that does not necessarily tell me the type, e.g. "30" could be 30, 30.0, or '30', that would depend on the type specified in the goal. I know that for ROS message types like std_msgs/Float64 one can use roslib.message.get_message_class("std_msgs/Float64") to get the correct python class. But for entries like float64 this becomes more complicated. Even using std_msgs/Float64 does not help because that also contains a float64 in the data field. My question is, is there a function to get the python type numpy.float64 from 'float64' in the message definition?

I know there is check_type but that only checks the type to raise an exception but does not return it.

I am on Indigo btw. Here a very small example

def create_goal(str_array):
    g = myactionGoal()
    for s, slot, t in zip(str_array, g.__slots__, g._slot_types):
        t = magic_function_to_get_type_from_string(t)
        setattr(g, slot, t(s))
    return g

EDIT:

One way of achieving this for simple datatypes would be:

def create_goal(str_array):
    g = myactionGoal()
    for s, slot, t in zip(str_array, g.__slots__, g._slot_types):
        t = type(getattr(g, slot)) # Get type of default value
        setattr(g, slot, t(s))
    return g

Because after the creation of the goal message, all the slots are intialised with the correct data type. This however does not work for things like float64[] because that would only tell me that it is supposed to be a list but not the expected type of the elements.

Thanks for your help!