Apologies in advance to anyone who has this post mangled, I use a couple Unicode characters at the end and Thunderbird wants to use UTF8 for the message encoding. Unless it does something weird, this post should still be legible... but I'm not going to rely on that. :)
William Gill wrote: >> 2) If you need to do any processing on the clipboard data, look at >> widget.selection_get [so named because of the way that X handles its >> clipboard] > > From my reading, w.selection_get will return the selected text in w, > and places it on the clipboard. I didn't see any way to get data from > the clipboard. Not exactly. The docs for selection_get say: """Return the contents of the current X selection. A keyword parameter selection specifies the name of the selection and defaults to PRIMARY. A keyword parameter displayof specifies a widget on the display to use.""" The "X selection" is another way of saying "clipboard," again because of the way that X manages the clipboard. In experimenting with this, I found a slight... fun issue involved in this. Selection_get is the correct method to call, but it doesn't quite work out of the box. >>> g.selection_get() Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? File "C:\Python24\Lib\lib-tk\Tkinter.py", line 574, in selection_get return self.tk.call(('selection', 'get') + self._options(kw)) _tkinter.TclError: PRIMARY selection doesn't exist or form "STRING" not defined This poses a small problem. I'm not sure whether this is a Win32-related issue, or it's because the PRIMARY selection isn't fully configured. Regardless, even if it worked it still wouldn't be what we wanted; the selection we want is CLIPBOARD. See this code: >>> g.clipboard_clear() >>> g.clipboard_append('I just love the wonderful clipboard management functions of Tk!') >>> g.selection_get(selection='CLIPBOARD') 'I just love the wonderful clipboard management functions of Tk!' And then, copying some text from this compose window... >>> g.selection_get(selection='CLIPBOARD') 'And then, copying some text from this compose window...' In theory, the clipboard will support more than text. This support is nontrivial, which is code for saying that I have no idea how to get it to work. Also, despite ICCCM standards, it looks like this clipboard management on win32 works as-is with unicode data -- under Tkinter, it returns a unicode string. (α β γ δ -- and good luck with -that- going through unmangled) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list