Question

I am making a pygame program where I have a string and whatever the user types it displays it in the pygame window. Here is the code:

    if (event.type==pygame.KEYDOWN):
                    if (event.key==pygame.K_BACKSPACE):
                            if (len(sin)>0):
                                    sin=""
                    elif (event.key==pygame.K_RETURN):
                            if (len(sin)==11):
                                    #sin.replace("-","")
                                    running=2
                                    screen.fill(white)
                            else:
                                    body=True

                    else:
                            sin=sin+chr(event.key)
    text=font.render(sin,True,(black),white) 

One problem is that it does not recognize special characters like (“:”,”;”,shift characters etc.) Is there a better way to code something like this?

Answer 1

Use event.unicode to get what you are looking for.

… The pygame.KEYDOWN event has an additional attributes unicode, and
scancode. unicode represents a single character string that is the
fully translated character entered. …

---

To answer your comment you just check event.unicode instead of event.key:

...
if (event.type==pygame.KEYDOWN):
    if (event.unicode==pygame.K_COLON): #to match a colon
        pass
    elif (event.unicode== (pygame.K_Z | pygame.KMOD_SHIFT)): #to explicitly match a capital Z instead of just a z
       pass
...