This little custom text editor is a pretty simple example of a wxPython app -- I've been careful not to include anything else in it. Instead, the idea is to provide a minimal example of something that's actually useful.
I've developed it in a literate style using some crude Perl I wrote back in March of 2000 and basically haven't revisited since; you can read the nicely formatted code here, or you can see the straight Python here, and you can download a Windows executable here to play with. To run the executable, you'll need to invoke it from the command line (if you just click the program, you'll get a snippy error message.) The command line is thus:
text_editor1 [name of text file]
Since the editor will save when it quits, I recommend not playing with anything you wanted to keep unchanged. Heh.
So the boilerplate of such a program is pretty straightforward, and that boilerplate is this first section of the document. Really I keep intending to put this boilerplate into some kind of macro so I don't have to keep copying it from old projects, but I haven't yet, so instead I'll just define it here. Maybe in the context of these app-a-week exercises, I'll get around to rebuilding some of these tools and then I'll move this boilerplate out of here. If I'm really going to be documenting a program a week, then I'll be motivated to make it easy on myself.
In keeping with the philosophy that this first section is boilerplate, then, I won't even talk about what I want the app to do until the third section, which is where I define the main window's class code -- that's where all the action is, so that's where I'll put my requirements. Fair? I thought so.
First, we import all our libraries. Here, these are minimal.
import string import sys from wxPython.wx import * |
Next, we handle our input. I'll put that into a separate section for convenience.
See Handling input |
The actual program in a wxPython program, from the standpoint of the code that does things the user interacts with, is in the main window class definition (at least, this is the case for a single-window application of the kind we're defining here.) That's definitely going into a separate section.
See The main_window class definition |
And the rest of the program is the infrastructure for dealing with setting up that main window. Easy. Oh, wait, my boilerplate uses one little helper function; let's define it here.
def notify_user (line, frame=None):
dlg = wxMessageDialog(frame, line, 'Text editor #1', wxOK | wxICON_INFORMATION)
#wxYES_NO | wxNO_DEFAULT | wxCANCEL | wxICON_INFORMATION)
dlg.ShowModal()
dlg.Destroy()
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OK, the rest is pretty easy. We define an application class which puts up the window, and we instantiate it. That's it.
class App(wxApp):
def OnInit(self):
frame = main_window(None, -1)
return true
app = App(0)
app.MainLoop()
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Handling input
In this program, I'm not going to do very much at all with the input -- essentially just read the name of the file in from the command line into a global variable. Which, actually, is pretty stupid, given that the command line is itself a variable, but at least it means we could do something different here if we wanted to.
try: input_filename = sys.argv[1] except: input_filename = '' |
The main_window class definition
Now we're down to the actual, you know, program. The task is this: I have a text file consisting of tab-delimited text in three columns. The first is a German phrase, the second a number which we can safely ignore for this, and the third is an English phrase which has been generated by a Perl script. That third starts with a question mark to denote that it is questionable -- and let me tell you, any machine-translated phrase generated by a script is quite questionable. Let me give you a couple of examples. Just two; I didn't actually save the initial translated guesses and I'm too rushed right now to reconstruct them. They're too wide to be comfortable in their original one-lined form, so I've broken the lines, with German, then English, etc.
Verzögerung Bodennaht Kontaktkühlung schließen am Sackabzug ?Delay bottom seam contact cooling close at bag takeoff Verzögerung Bodennaht Kontaktkühlung schließen an der Öffnungsstation ?Delay bottom seam contact cooling close to of the opening stationOK. What I want to appear is still pretty ugly English, but it's technical machine output and space is limited:
Delay: close bottom seam contact cooling at bag takeoff Delay: close bottom seam contact cooling at the opening station(I've omitted the first two columns for aesthetic reasons here.) In these two samples, I've done the following: inserted a question mark, moved the word "close" to the beginning of its phrase, and quickly replaced "to of" with "at" (I could have made a better Perl script, but the point is that with the right editor, it is quicker for me to manually change some instances than to derive a rule to change them all, correctly, with no false positives).
In Word, if I highlight "close" and drag it to the new position, I end up with this:
Delay closebottom seam contact cooling at bag takeoff Delay closebottom seam contact cooling to of the opening stationThis sucks mightily. It means I have to insert a space and take another out, by hand, and get the mouse to hit the right places very accurately to do so or move the cursor with the arrow keys.
Even worse, if I drop "close" in the middle of a word, I might end up with e.g. "Delay bot closetom seam" -- and then I have to undo, or retype.
Over many, many drag operations this all adds up and it breaks my concentration. A very bad thing indeed. So my primary need for this new editor is that: mouse selection should select only words, no spaces, and a drag within the sentence must preserve word spacing (that is, spaces should remain around the words dropped, and no double spaces may be introduced.) A drop must also always preserve wordness, that is, if I drop a word in the middle of another word, it should insert the dropped word in front of the one I dropped it into.
And while I'm at it, let's throw in a couple more pretty simple requirements -- let's list them all, in fact:
- Drag and drop of words/phrases must preserve interword spacing
- Drag and drop must preserve wordness of the dropped text
- The capitalization of the sentence must be preserved (initial cap)
- Sentence-internal capitalization if I hit a key (e.g. F2 on a word toggles capitalization)
- A single key jumps to the next uninspected phrase (using the initial question mark)
- A single key on the left hand deletes the current selection
Which brings us to the implementation. The core of any wxPython program is at least one class implementing the frame object. This class provides a central place to hang all the windows stuff, defines menus and event handlers, and so forth. The "stock program" consists of a single such frame class, along with a bunch of handling code, dialog builders/handlers, and so on. Most of the meat of what's on that window is generally one or more widgets represented by control classes, in this case the basic text editor control.
I'll set the window up in its constructor, then add a single control, the wxTextCtrl that gets written to self.control.
(Pun intended, yes.) Once the text control is defined, I load the file and set the font style to a fixed-aspect font,
and set up some flags and the events we'll be handling. Finally, I set the window to visible with self.Show(true).
class main_window(wxFrame):
def __init__(self, parent, id, filename=input_filename):
h = 500
w = 500
wxFrame.__init__(self, parent, -1, 'Custom text editor #1', size = (w, h),
style=wxDEFAULT_FRAME_STYLE|wxNO_FULL_REPAINT_ON_RESIZE)
# Set the filename.
self.textfile = filename
if filename == '':
notify_user ("Stupid user, invoke from the command line:\ntext_editor1 [text file name]")
# Create the text control, load the file, and set the font.
self.control = wxTextCtrl(self, 10, style=wxTE_MULTILINE|wxTE_RICH|wxHSCROLL)
if self.textfile != '': self.control.LoadFile (self.textfile)
self.control.SetStyle (0, self.control.GetLastPosition(), wxTextAttr(wxNullColour, wxNullColour, \
wxFont (9, wxMODERN, wxNORMAL, wxNORMAL, false)))
# Set up state variables.
self.typing_now = 1
self.selection = 0
# Define event handlers.
EVT_CLOSE(self, self.OnExit)
EVT_CHAR(self.control, self.EvtChar)
EVT_LEFT_UP(self.control, self.EvtLeftUp)
EVT_TEXT(self, 10, self.EvtText)
# Set the window to visible.
self.Show(true)
See Handling EVT_CHAR: key pressed in the text control
See Handling EVT_TEXT: changes to text control contents
See Handling EVT_LEFT_UP: left mouse button released
See Handling EVT_CLOSE: program exit
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Let's look at our four event handlers in roughly the same order I wrote them; my first task beyond getting this up in the first place was to ensure that when I use the mouse to select something, only words get selected. Then I made sure that dragging and dropping did what I wanted. After all that, I came up with the key changes, so that's next. Finally, I realized that I didn't want to do much work to save the text, so that's what happens on EVT_CLOSE.
Handling EVT_LEFT_UP: left mouse button released
So how's this work? Pretty simple, really: after something is selected, the left mouse button goes up, so that's the event to hook. When the button goes up, the first thing is to check that the start and end of the selection are different (that we have a selection, not an insertion point.) If that's true, well, you can see what we do: grab the current line of text, expand the selection to the word start before the selection and the word end after it, and then we're done. The selection is also arbitrarily restricted to a single line (to simplify this code and because I never want to move lines around in my file.) You can pretty much see how all that plays out in Python, below.
def EvtLeftUp (self, event):
#print self.typing_now
self.typing_now = 0
event.Skip()
# Control received only after selection modified. But *not* during drag and drop!
# Exception: if long selection, click in middle, turns into insertion point -- control received before collapse
(start, end) = self.control.GetSelection()
if start != end:
(scol, sline) = self.control.PositionToXY(start)
(ecol, eline) = self.control.PositionToXY(end)
#print "selected %s-%s to %s-%s" % (scol, sline, ecol, eline)
# Move start to start of word.
line = self.control.GetLineText(sline)
while scol > 0 and scol < len(line) \
and (string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol]) > -1 \
or string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol-1]) == -1):
#print "%s: '%s' and '%s'" % (scol, line[scol], line[scol-1])
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol]) > -1: scol = scol + 1
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol-1]) == -1: scol = scol - 1
start = self.control.XYToPosition (scol, sline)
if eline != sline:
ecol = len(line)
eline = sline
else:
# Move end to end of word.
line = self.control.GetLineText(eline)
while ecol > 0 and ecol < len(line) \
and (string.find(string.whitespace, line[ecol]) == -1 \
or string.find(string.whitespace, line[ecol-1]) > -1):
#print "%s: '%s' and '%s'" % (ecol, line[ecol], line[ecol-1])
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[ecol-1]) > -1: ecol = ecol - 1
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[ecol]) == -1: ecol = ecol + 1
end = self.control.XYToPosition (ecol, eline)
self.control.SetSelection (start, end)
self.last_selection = (start, end)
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Handling EVT_TEXT: changes to text control contents
EVT_TEXT fires whenever the contents of the text control change -- probably more often than we want. I think it would be possible to intercept the drag and drop events directly, but to do so I'd have to subclass the text control, and that's beyond the scope of what I want to do here. And this solution works for my purposes.
Instead, I set a "typing_now" flag whenever a key is pressed, and I clear it whenever the left mouse button goes up. If the contents change when I'm not typing, I figure it's a drop. Close enough for government work.
This section of the program is by far the most involved, and I'm not going to explain it blow by blow, because you can figure it
out if you're interested. I will note that it proved easier to paste material from the Clipboard than to mess with the Replace
method of the wxTextControl (buggy behavor on the part of wx), and so copying to the Clipboard features prominently in some of this
code. I'll also state that if I were to subclass wxTextControl to do this, I would definitely move some sections of
this code into convenient methods. That's better left for another week, though.
def EvtText (self, event):
if not self.typing_now:
(start, end) = self.control.GetSelection()
# Not the best drop detection.
if start != end:
# Find starting position
if self.last_selection[0] > start:
where_started = self.last_selection[0] + end - start
else:
where_started = self.last_selection[0]
(ocol, oline) = self.control.PositionToXY(where_started)
line = self.control.GetLineText(oline)
after_tab = false
if line[ocol - 1] == "\t": after_tab = true
# Remove orphaned whitespace and put selection back where it was
n = ocol
try:
while string.find(string.whitespace, line[n]) > -1 and n < len(line): n = n+1
except:
n = ocol
where_started = where_started - 1
ocol = ocol - 1
if (n != ocol):
self.control.Remove(where_started, self.control.XYToPosition(n, oline))
line = self.control.GetLineText(oline)
if wxTheClipboard.Open():
wxTheClipboard.SetData(wxTextDataObject(string.upper(line[ocol])))
wxTheClipboard.Close()
self.control.SetSelection(where_started, where_started+1)
self.control.Paste()
if where_started < start:
start = start - n + ocol
end = end - n + ocol
self.control.SetSelection(start, end)
# Move selection to start or end of drop target word, and compensate whitespace
(scol, sline) = self.control.PositionToXY(start)
(ecol, eline) = self.control.PositionToXY(end)
line = self.control.GetLineText(sline)
dropped = line[scol:ecol]
if after_tab and dropped == string.capitalize(string.lower(dropped)): dropped = string.lower(dropped)
self.control.Remove(start, end)
line = self.control.GetLineText(sline)
if wxTheClipboard.Open():
wxTheClipboard.SetData(wxTextDataObject(dropped))
wxTheClipboard.Close()
if start < where_started: # Moved backwards; move to start of word.
while scol > 0 and scol < len(line) \
and (string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol]) > -1 \
or string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol-1]) == -1):
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol-1]) == -1: scol = scol - 1
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol]) > -1: scol = scol + 1
start = self.control.XYToPosition (scol, sline)
if wxTheClipboard.Open():
wxTheClipboard.SetData(wxTextDataObject(dropped + " "))
wxTheClipboard.Close()
else:
while scol > 0 and scol < len(line) - len(dropped) \
and (string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol]) == -1 \
or string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol-1]) > -1):
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol]) == -1: scol = scol + 1
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol-1]) > -1: scol = scol - 1
start = self.control.XYToPosition (scol, sline)
if wxTheClipboard.Open():
wxTheClipboard.SetData(wxTextDataObject(" " + dropped))
wxTheClipboard.Close()
self.control.SetInsertionPoint (start)
self.control.Paste ()
event.Skip()
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Handling EVT_CHAR: key pressed in the text control
Handling the keyboard is straightforward, as you can see. I'm only doing something special with three keys (F2 toggles the capitalization of the current word, F3 goes to the next tab-question-mark boundary, and F4 deletes the current selection). If the key struck is none of those, then I set the "typing_now" flag I mentioned earlier.
def EvtChar (self, event):
k = event.GetKeyCode()
if k == WXK_F3:
(start, end) = self.control.GetSelection()
(scol, sline) = self.control.PositionToXY(start)
line = self.control.GetLineText(sline)
if end - start == 1 and line[scol] == '?': sline = sline + 1
found = false
while not found:
line = self.control.GetLineText(sline)
loc = string.find (line, "\t?")
if loc > -1:
found = true
self.control.SetSelection (self.control.XYToPosition(loc+1, sline), self.control.XYToPosition(loc+2, sline))
else:
sline = sline + 1
elif k == WXK_F2:
(start, end) = self.control.GetSelection()
(scol, sline) = self.control.PositionToXY(start)
line = self.control.GetLineText(sline)
while scol > 0 and scol < len(line) \
and (string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol]) > -1 \
or string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol-1]) == -1):
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol-1]) == -1: scol = scol - 1
if string.find(string.whitespace, line[scol]) > -1: scol = scol + 1
if wxTheClipboard.Open():
wxTheClipboard.SetData(wxTextDataObject(string.swapcase(line[scol])))
wxTheClipboard.Close()
self.control.SetSelection (self.control.XYToPosition(scol, sline), self.control.XYToPosition(scol+1, sline))
self.control.Paste()
self.control.SetSelection(start, end)
elif k == WXK_F4:
#self.control.SaveFile (self.textfile)
(start, end) = self.control.GetSelection()
self.control.Remove(start, end)
else:
self.typing_now = 1
self.selection = 0
event.Skip()
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Handling EVT_CLOSE: program exit
Finally, when the program closes I save the file. This means if I screw up, I'm sunk, which is pretty poor interface design if I were going to release this into the wild, but since it's just a quick fix for myself, I'm happy.
def OnExit (self, event):
if self.textfile != '': self.control.SaveFile(self.textfile)
event.Skip()
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Conclusion
And thus concludes the lecture. I hope to do one of these roughly every week, on topics you're more than welcome to suggest at the Software Jedi's place.
