pygame.scrap and clipboard access

[clach04]

I'm not 100% what the support status is of pygame.scrap.get(), specifically for reading text clipboard content.

Under Microsoft Windows 10, with Python 3.12.5 64-bit and pygame-c 2.5.2 the text support is returned from pygame.scrap.get_types() is:

'text/plain;charset=utf-8'

But when calling:

pygame.scrap.get('text/plain;charset=utf-8')

The result is utf-16-le, with a NUL terminator (i.e. 0x0000) and not utf-8 which .

Python 3.12.5 (tags/v3.12.5:ff3bc82, Aug  6 2024, 20:45:27) [MSC v.1940 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pygame
pygame-ce 2.5.2 (SDL 2.30.8, Python 3.12.5)
>>> pygame.version
<module 'pygame.version' from 'C:\\code\\py\\PyDPainter\\py3venv\\Lib\\site-packages\\pygame\\version.py'>
>>> pygame.__version__
'2.5.2'

I'm not sure as I can see a number of older tickets:

• List of all deprecated features in pygame #2943
• Delete old unused scrap module code #1904
• Updated scrap code example. #2197
• Update example code that uses scrap #2084
• Delete old unused scrap module code #1904
• PATCH: pygame.scrap on X11, fix copying into PRIMARY selection (208) #223
• ImportError: No module named scrap on Windows 7 x64 (105) #120

When I look at the scrap.pyi and rst documentation that gets installed via pip it mentions 2.2.0 deprecations (same when looking at the C code) BUT I'm not seeing any warning messages when using those older API calls.

clipboard_text = pygame.scrap.get_text()

works great, so I'm up and running but not sure if I should have seen warnings at runtime.

[Starbuck5]

Yes, you should've seen warnings at runtime.

>>> import pygame
pygame-ce 2.5.2 (SDL 2.30.8, Python 3.9.5)
>>> pygame.init()
(5, 0)
>>> screen = pygame.display.set_mode((200,200))
>>> pygame.scrap.init()
<stdin>:1: DeprecationWarning: pygame.scrap.init deprecated since 2.2.0
>>> pygame.scrap.get_types()
<stdin>:1: DeprecationWarning: pygame.scrap.get_types deprecated since 2.2.0
['text/plain;charset=utf-8', 'Chromium internal source URL']
>>> pygame.scrap.get('text/plain;charset=utf-8')
<stdin>:1: DeprecationWarning: pygame.scrap.get deprecated since 2.2.0. Consider using pygame.scrap.get_text instead.
b"'\x00t\x00e\x00x\x00t\x00/\x00p\x00l\x00a\x00i\x00n\x00;\x00c\x00h\x00a\x00r\x00s\x00e\x00t\x00=\x00u\x00t\x00f\x00-\x008\x00'\x00\x00\x00"
>>> pygame.quit()

Also from your comment I'm unsure you've seen that we have docs hosted online: https://pyga.me/docs/ref/scrap.html

put_text, get_text, and has_text are solid from a support standpoint.

All the other scrap APIs we are just going to try not to change at all, we may drop them in pygame-ce 3.0.

Basically they've been so broken for so long there's no fixing them, because if we change it to be correct maybe that breaks the 2 applications actually using it that rely on it being UTF16, for instance.

[clach04]

Yes, you should've seen warnings at runtime.

import pygame
pygame-ce 2.5.2 (SDL 2.30.8, Python 3.9.5)
pygame.init()
(5, 0)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((200,200))
pygame.scrap.init()
:1: DeprecationWarning: pygame.scrap.init deprecated since 2.2.0
pygame.scrap.get_types()
:1: DeprecationWarning: pygame.scrap.get_types deprecated since 2.2.0
['text/plain;charset=utf-8', 'Chromium internal source URL']
pygame.scrap.get('text/plain;charset=utf-8')
:1: DeprecationWarning: pygame.scrap.get deprecated since 2.2.0. Consider using pygame.scrap.get_text instead.
b"'\x00t\x00e\x00x\x00t\x00/\x00p\x00l\x00a\x00i\x00n\x00;\x00c\x00h\x00a\x00r\x00s\x00e\x00t\x00=\x00u\x00t\x00f\x00-\x008\x00'\x00\x00\x00"
pygame.quit()

Confirmed, this test case works fine for me, warnings as expected. But for whatever reason I'm not seeing them in a real application like https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter

Also from your comment I'm unsure you've seen that we have docs hosted online: https://pyga.me/docs/ref/scrap.html

Much easier to read than the rst version.

Thank you for the quick and in-depth responses here and in the PyDPainter project. I'm very grateful to the pygame-ce team, you really rescued PyGame! I'm not actively using PyGame at the moment, but one of my first PyGame projects was a hardware tester that ended up finding a bug in a linux kernel driver for gfx :-)

put_text, get_text, and has_text are solid from a support standpoint.

All the other scrap APIs we are just going to try not to change at all, we may drop them in pygame-ce 3.0.

Basically they've been so broken for so long there's no fixing them, because if we change it to be correct maybe that breaks the 2 applications actually using it that rely on it being UTF16, for instance.

Makes sense!

[oddbookworm]

Confirmed, this test case works fine for me, warnings as expected. But for whatever reason I'm not seeing them in a real application like https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter

PyDPainter uses upstream pygame, not pygame-ce. The old scrap API is only deprecated in pygame-ce

[oddbookworm]

The reason we deprecated it was because it was inconsistent and unreliable

[Starbuck5]

@clach04 One other thing about the docs, you can view them locally with python -m pygame.docs. Works on both pygame and pygame-ce, thanks to the effort of current pygame-ce contributors.

[clach04]

Confirmed, this test case works fine for me, warnings as expected. But for whatever reason I'm not seeing them in a real application like https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter

PyDPainter uses upstream pygame, not pygame-ce. The old scrap API is only deprecated in pygame-ce

My machine does not have pygame, only pygame-ce - see https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter/pull/206/files