chriskiehl/pyrobot

pyrobot

Hear ye, hear ye!

PyRobot was written for fun over a long weekend. Development on this stopped long ago. If you're looking for a pure Python automation library that is actively developed and works on Windows, OSX, and linux, checkout PyAutoGui!

What is it?

PyRobot is a lightweight, pure Python Windows automation library loosely modeled after Java's Robot Class. It can be used to drive applications that don't provide an API or any way of hooking into them programatically. Good for when you can't (or don't want to) install the great, but a bit hefty, pywin32 libraries.

You can check out a couple of use cases for PyRobot here

Installation

PyRobot is a single Python file. So, you can either download it directly from this github page, or clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/chriskiehl/pyrobot

Usage

Similar to Java, everything is controlled via a single class.

# Import the robot class from the pyrobot module
from pyrobot import Robot

# create an instance of the class
robot = Robot()

# Launch a program
robot.start_program('program_name') 

# Do cool stuff
location_of_field = (340, 400)
expected_color = (255,255,255)

pixel = robot.get_pixel(location_of_field)
if pixel == (expected_color): 
   robot.set_mouse_pos(location_of_field)
   robot.click_mouse(button='left')
   robot.add_to_clipboard('Hello world! How are ya!')
   robot.paste()


# etc.. 

# If you need to take screengrabs, and have PIL Installed, 
# PyRobot extends the default behavior of PIL by 
# allowing the entire virtual screen to be targeted (rather 
# than just the primary). 

# returns a list of screen rects for all attached devices
monitors_coords = robot.get_display_monitors() 

# Takes a screenshot of the desktop and returns a PIL Image object
im = robot.take_screenshot(monitors_coords[-1]) # Coordinates of last monitor

# You can also do arbitrarily sized boxes
left = 100
top = 430
width = 1000
height = 750

im = robot.take_screenshot((left, top, width, height))

# Save the PIL Image to disk
im.save('my_awesome_screenshot.png', 'png')

# and so on

Updates

• Added ability to read data from the clipboard.

    my_var = robot.get_clipboard_data()
  

• convenience method press_and_release

     robot.press_and_release('caps_lock')
  

• Added Key class

    from pyrobot import Robot, Keys
    robot = Robot() 
    
    robot.press_and_release(Keys.forward_slash)
  

Doc

Mouse

Keys

Clipboard

Screen

Misc

Special take_snapshot Note

Being that Python has no built in Image library (that I know of), it seemed of little use to include a snapshot method which simply saves the picture to disk. For 90% of program automation, I find that querying pixels works fairly well (e.g. robot.get_pixel). However, if you need to do more advanced display searching, or want to do template matching, you'll need an external library. So there is a method in there to contruct a PIL Image object. It just, of course, requires that PIL be installed. Other than that, dependency free! :-)

TODO

• Allow specific window/program targeting so that relative coordinates can be used while scripting.

Contact

Feature request? Bug? Hate it?
Drop me a line at [email protected], or on Twitter @thechriskiehl