Insert text before and after selected text in PyQt5 QPlainTextEdit

Question

I am trying to insertText before and after the selected word in QPlainTextEdit PyQt5 For example: when I write "My name is AbdulWahab" and select AbdulWahab then if I press left Parenthesis then AbdulWahab should turn into (AbdulWahab)

Thank you

Answer 1

You can achieve Your desired functionality using multiple different approaches.
Especially part with catching keyPressEvent.
I personally prefer re-implementing QPlainTextEdit.
You can find comments in the code, I hope it's clear what's going on there.

Here is sample code You can use:

import sys

from PyQt5 import QtGui
from PyQt5.QtCore import QEvent, Qt
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QMainWindow, QPlainTextEdit


class SmartTextEdit(QPlainTextEdit):

    def keyPressEvent(self, e: QtGui.QKeyEvent) -> None:
        """Catch every keypress and act on Left parentheses key"""
        if e.type() == QEvent.KeyPress and e.key() == Qt.Key_ParenLeft:
            cursor = self.textCursor()
            if cursor.hasSelection():
                # Here we confirmed to have some text selected, so wrap it in parentheses and replace selected text
                cursor.insertText("(" + cursor.selectedText() + ")")
                # Return here, we supress "(" being written to our text area
                return

        # not interesting key was pressed, pass Event to QPlainTextEdit
        return super().keyPressEvent(e)


class MainWindow(QMainWindow):

    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()

        # Create our SmartTextEdit
        self.textarea = SmartTextEdit()
        self.setCentralWidget(self.textarea)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)

    win = MainWindow()
    win.show()

    app.exec_()