On 12/24/2016 07:43 PM, Alan Gauld via Tutor wrote:
On 25/12/16 01:21, Jim Byrnes wrote:
I am not trying to automate libreoffice using subprocess.
No, but you are trying to automate LO from within Python
by sending it keystrokes and that's not easy. That's why I
previously asked whether you really wanted to open the LO
file directly and manipulate it from within Python
- that's (slightly) easier than manipulating LO directly
and much easier than manipulating LO from Python via
keystrokes.
message I was told that subprocess was the way to open libreoffice from
a python script.
Which is true if you want to bring up a LO session for
your user to manipulate. But it's not the way to drive
LO automatically. (One option is to start LO from Python
then use macros within LO to do the automation - there may
even be a command line switch to trigger a macro - I can't
remember off hand)
To drive LO via keystrokes your program needs to inject
key/mouse events into the LO event queue. That's not easy
and not very reliable either(*). There are some libraries that
can help but it should be the path of last resort.
(*)LO remembers its last screen setting and opens with them,
if those screen settings are different than the ones you
programmed for then navigation will be different and so on.
That's easy to deal with for a human who can see the screen
but sending keystrokes programmatically you are effectively
trying to drive the system blindfolded!
I don't think I need to "know where stuff is" to manipulate LO. At first
I was just using Selenium to get the data from the web page, but the
focus would end up in the url bar. I forget the exact details but I
could not get Selenium to manipulate Chrome anymore at that point. I did
some searching and found pykeyboard. Using it I was able to send Ctrl-A
and then Ctrl-C to copy the page to the clipboard.
My thinking is if I can get LO to accept keystrokes I can send
Shift-Ctrl-V to paste special and the two enter keys to answer dialog
questions and paste the info into a sheet. I would use the fact that LO
reopens to where it was closed to my advantage by not having to use a
macro to navigate to the proper page.
Up until this point in the script I have used a combination of Selenium
and pykeyboard to log on to a web site and put some info in the
clipboard. Now I need to send keystrokes to libreoffice to paste from
the clipboard into the spreadsheet.
Or you could just open the spreadsheet file directly
and insert the data directly into it from Python. I think
there is a library for that - there are several for doing
it in Excel (so if your spreadsheet is in Excel format it
is fairly easy). Or, if you can use CSV format, its just a
standard library module.
I'll look into these alternatives if I can't figure out how to get
keystrokes into LO using my present approach.
Alternatively you can use the LO API to directly inject
the data into the spreadsheet objects (like using COM
in Microsoft land).
I have used pyuno api to automate libreoffice in the past, but it was a
time consuming and confusing process.
Trust me it is nowhere near as confusing and frustrating
as trying to drive LO (Or any other GUI) via keystrokes!
Based on my success with pykeyboard and Chrome I thought it would be
easier than diving back into Uno. However, using subprocess seems to be
blocking me from sending any keystrokes to LO. I don't understand
subprocess well enough to know if it is actually blocking my keystrokes.
I concluded that based on the fact that when I closed LO the two
enter_keys at the end of the script were executed in the terminal.
Is there a way to terminate subprocess and still keep LO open so
pykeyboard can send it keystrokes from the script?
I was trying this approach
because it looked like I could avoid the uno complexity.
If there isn't a direct file manipulation library for LO
spreadsheets then UNO is probably the easiest option.
Regards, Jim
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