How to use keyboard event as part of a conditional statement

Question

I'm trying to make a program that outputs a key press event as a response to another keyboard event. How do I get it to use the particular value of the key pressed in a conditional statement? The codes I try seem to be skipping the conditional statement altogether.

Initially tried [if key == '1':], then tired by [if key == 1:] . Also tried various means of assigning [key] to a variable. Also tried [print('2')] instead of using [pyautogui.typewrite('2')] . Tried putting the code both in on_press(key) and in on_release(key).

`

    import pyautogui
    from pynput.keyboard import Key, Listener

    def on_press(key):
        print('{0} pressed'.format(key))

    def on_release(key):
        print('{0} release'.format(key))
        k = format(key)
        if k == '1':       #THIS IS THE PART I CAN'T GET TO WORK
            pyautogui.typewrite('2', 0.5)
        if key == Key.esc:
    # Stop listener
            return False
    # Collect events until released
    with Listener(
        on_press=on_press,
        on_release=on_release) as listener:
    listener.join()

`

Expected to output '2' whenever I press '1' on the keyboard(in addition to the output of the keypress and keyrelease event). The output for the pressing of '1' doesn't work.

Answer 1

You can use keyboard library, in order to handle/create key events.

while True:  
    try: 
        if keyboard.is_pressed('1'):   
            print('{} is pressed'.format(1))
            break
        else:
            pass
    except:
        break 

the above code runs until 1 is received as a keypress. Upon pressing the key, 1 is pressed will be printed.

You can further use other functions of this library, in order to detect a key down even too.

Answer 2

The key parameter that your on_press / on_release receives is not the character string but rather a Key/KeyChar object, that's why you can't compare it directly with a string.

To access the keyboard input character, use key.char instead:

def on_press(key): 
    print("pressed '{}'".format(key.char))

Look at the example codes on pynput's documentation on how to capture non letter keys .