pygame.scrap

pygame module for clipboard support.

EXPERIMENTAL!: meaning this API may change, or disappear in later pygame releases. If you use this, your code will break with the next pygame release.

The scrap module is for getting and putting stuff from the clipboard. So you can copy and paste things between pygame, and other application types. It defines some basic own data types

SCRAP_PPM
SCRAP_PBM
SCRAP_BMP
SCRAP_TEXT

to be placed into the clipboard and allows to use define own clipboard types. SCRAP_PPM, SCRAP_PBM and SCRAP_BMP are suitable for surface buffers to be shared with other applications, while SCRAP_TEXT is an alias for the plain text clipboard type.

The SCRAP_* types refer to the following MIME types and register those as well as the default operating system type for this type of data:

SCRAP_TEXT text/plain    for plain text
SCRAP_PBM  image/pbm     for PBM encoded image data
SCRAP_PPM  image/ppm     for PPM encoded image data
SCRAP_BMP  image/bmp     for BMP encoded image data

Depending on the platform additional types are automatically registered when data is placed into the clipboard to guarantee a consistent sharing behaviour with other applications. The following listed types can be used as string to be passed to the respective pygame.scrap module functions.

For Windows platforms, the additional types are supported automatically and resolve to their internal definitions:

text/plain;charset=utf-8 for UTF-8 encoded text
audio/wav                for WAV encoded audio
image/tiff               for TIFF encoded image data

For X11 platforms, the additional types are supported automatically and resolve to their internal definitions:

UTF8_STRING               for UTF-8 encoded text
text/plain;charset=utf-8  for UTF-8 encoded text
COMPOUND_TEXT             for COMPOUND text

As stated before you can define own types for the clipboard, those however might not be usable by other applications. Thus data pasted into the clipboard using

pygame.scrap.put ("own_data", data)

can only be used by applications, which query the clipboard for the "own_data" type.

New in pygame 1.8. Only works for Windows, X11 and Mac OS X so far. On Mac OSX only text works at the moment - other types will be supported in the next release.

pygame.scrap.init () -> None

Initializes the scrap module.

Tries to initialize the scrap module and raises an exception, if it fails. Note that this module requires a set display surface, so you have to make sure, you acquired one earlier using pygame.display.set_mode().

pygame.scrap.get (type) -> bytes

Gets the data for the specified type from the clipboard.

Returns the data for the specified type from the clipboard. The data is returned as a byte string and might need further processing, such as decoding to Unicode. If no data for the passed type is available, None is returned.

text = pygame.scrap.get (SCRAP_TEXT)
if text:
    # Do stuff with it.
else:
    print "There does not seem to be text in the clipboard."

pygame.scrap.get_types () -> list

Gets a list of the available clipboard types.

Gets a list of strings with the identifiers for the available clipboard types. Each identifier can be used in the scrap.get() method to get the clipboard content of the specific type. If there is no data in the clipboard, an empty list is returned.

types = pygame.scrap.get_types ()
for t in types:
    if "text" in t:
        # There is some content with the word "text" in it. It's
        # possibly text, so print it.
        print pygame.scrap.get (t)

pygame.scrap.put(type, data) -> None

Places data into the clipboard.

Places data for a specific clipboard type into the clipboard. The data must be a string buffer. The type is a string identifying the type of data placed into the clipboard. This can be one of the native SCRAP_PBM, SCRAP_PPM, SCRAP_BMP or SCRAP_TEXT values or an own string identifier.

The method raises an exception, if the content could not be placed into the clipboard.

fp = open ("example.bmp", "rb")
pygame.scrap.put (SCRAP_BMP, fp.read ())
fp.close ()
# Now you can acquire the image data from the clipboard in other
# applications.
pygame.scrap.put (SCRAP_TEXT, "A text to copy")
pygame.scrap.put ("Plain text", "A text to copy")

pygame.scrap.contains (type) -> bool

Checks, whether a certain type is available in the clipboard.

Returns True, if data for the passed type is available in the clipboard, False otherwise.

if pygame.scrap.contains (SCRAP_TEXT):
    print "There is text in the clipboard."
if pygame.scrap.contains ("own_data_type"):
    print "There is stuff in the clipboard."

pygame.scrap.lost() -> bool

Checks whether the clipboard is currently owned by the application.

Returns True, if the clipboard is currently owned by the pygame application, False otherwise.

if pygame.scrap.lost ():
   print "No content from me anymore. The clipboard is used by someone else."

pygame.scrap.set_mode(mode) -> None

Sets the clipboard access mode.

Sets the access mode for the clipboard. This is only of interest for X11 environments, where clipboard modes for mouse selections (SRAP_SELECTION) and the clipboard (SCRAP_CLIPBOARD) are available. Setting the mode to SCRAP_SELECTION in other environments will not cause any difference.

If a value different from SCRAP_CLIPBOARD or SCRAP_SELECTION is passed, a ValueError will be raised.