Handling spreadsheet data through the clipboard in GTK

Question

I\'m using a GtkSheet widget in PyGTK to power my application\'s spreadsheet, and it gives me an API to pull and push data out of cells. (I looked at using GtkTreeView, but it s

Answer 1

To catch the paste event, you need to first create a custom entry class (PastableEntry in this example) that inherits from gtksheet.ItemEntry. During its initialisation, we connect to the paste-clipboard signal to trap paste events:

class PastableEntry(gtksheet.ItemEntry):
    def __init__(self):
        gtksheet.ItemEntry.__init__(self)
        self.connect('paste-clipboard', self.__on_paste)

The hard work is in the event handler. First we need to get the clipboard contents. In Unix, clipboard sources can advertise multiple data formats. Based on your screenshot, I assume you're trying to copy data from Gnumeric. Gnumeric supports application/x-gnumeric, text/html, UTF8_STRING, COMPOUND_TEXT, and STRING. For this example we'll use the UTF8_STRING format, which looks like this:

1,1  1,2  1,3 
2,1  2,2  2,3 
3,1  3,2  3,3

Obviously this fails horribly if any of the cells contain a tab or newline character, but we'll use this for simplicity. In a real world application you may want to parse the application/x-gnumeric or text/html formatted data.

Back to our PastableEntry class, now we define the paste event handler:

    def __on_paste(self, entry):
        clip = gtk.Clipboard()
        data = clip.wait_for_contents('UTF8_STRING')
        text = data.get_text()
        sheet = self.parent
        o_row, o_col = sheet.get_active_cell()
        for i_row, row in enumerate(text.split('\n')):
            for i_col, cell in enumerate(row.split('\t')):
                sheet.set_cell_text(o_row + i_row, o_col + i_col, cell)
        self.stop_emission('paste-clipboard')

It should be quite self-explanatory. We split the clipboard data into rows (by newline characters) and then into cells (by tab characters), and set the Sheet cell values accordingly.

The stop_emission is there to stop GTK+ from running the default handler for paste operations. Without that line, the selected cell will be overwritten with the raw data.

We then register the class with GObject:

gobject.type_register(PastableEntry)

Finally, to actually use our custom entry class, pass it to the constructor of gtksheet.Sheet:

s = gtksheet.Sheet(20, 20, "Sheet 1", entry_type=PastableEntry)