@dirk-thomas I determined that the issue with my previous pull request (#1146) was that the change was based on the lunar branch, rather than the branch I was developing the pull request for (kinetic). In my attempt to move the pull request to be based on kinetic-devel I accidentally butchered the old pull request.

The issues you referred to in the old pull request have been resolved, and running rostopic list functions fully as expected.

Resolves issue #946.

The only function in rostopic for listing the available topics is built exclusively for the command line interface; this adds a public function for other applications that want a list of topics.

Usage:

import rostopic
publishers, subscribers = rostopic.get_topic_list()
for topic, type, node_count in publishers:
    print("Publisher: %s, [%s] (%d nodes)" % (topic, type, node_count))
for topic, type, node_count in subscribers:
    print("Subscriber: %s, [%s] (%d nodes)" % (topic, type, node_count))