Question

I was using event.unicode for this task previously. If I hit shift+9, then the event for the key down has a unicode attribute of ‘(‘. And if I hit shift+alt+9, then the event for the key down has a unicode attribute of ‘(‘, and the keyboard also sends a keydown for an alt key, so that I know one was pressed.

If, however, I press ctrl+shift+9, then event.unicode == u''. How do I get u'(' back from that?

(similarly, for ctrl+shift+a, I get '\x01')

Answer 1

Well, all keystrokes you revieve while CTRL is pressed are “altered”, since this was the whole intention for creating the CTRL key: Sending control instructions instead of simply text.

If you look at a ASCII table, you’ll see e.g. how CTRL+H maps to the control character BS (Backspace).

So, no chance for you here to recieve '(' on CTRL+SHIFT+9 simply through KEY_DOWN.

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You’ll have to go through pygame.key.get_pressed() to check for pressed keys.

    if e.type == KEYDOWN:
        k = pygame.key.get_pressed()
        m = pygame.key.get_mods()
        if m & KMOD_SHIFT and k[K_9]:
            if m & KMOD_CTRL:
                print "controlled yay!"
            else:
                print "yay!"