Need example/help with GtkTextBuffer (of GtkTextView) serialize/deserialize

Question

I am trying to save user's bold/italic/font/etc tags in a GtkTextView. Using GtkTextBuffer.get_text() does not return the tags.

The best documentation I have found on this is: http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygtk/class-gtktextbuffer.html#method-gtktextbuffer--register-serialize-format

However, I do not understand the function arguments. It would be infinitely handy to have an example of how these are used to save/load a textview with tags in it.

Edit: I would like to clarify what I am trying to accomplish. Basically I want to save/load the textview's text+tags. I have no desire to do anything more complicated than that. I am using pickle as the file format, so I dont need any help here on how to save it or in what format. Just need a way to pull/push the data so that the user loses nothing that he/she sees on screen. Thank you.

Answer 1

I haven't worked with GtkTextBuffer's serialization. Reading the documentation you linked, I would suggest trying the default serializer, by calling

textbuffer.register_serialize_tagset()

This gives you GTK+'s built-in proprietary serializer. Being proprietary here means that it doesn't serialize into some well-known format; but if all you need is the ability to save out the text buffer's contents and load them back, this should be fine.

Of course the source code is available inside GTK+ if you really want to figure out how it works; I would recommend against trying to implement e.g. a stand-alone de-serializer though, since there are probably no guarantees made by GTK+ that the format will remain as-is.

Answer 2

If you need to save the tags because you just want to copy the text into another text buffer, you can use gtk.TextBuffer.insert_range().

If you need to save the text with tags into another format readable by other programs, I once wrote a library with a GTK text buffer serializer to and from RTF. It doesn't have any Python bindings though. But in any case the code is a good example of how to use the serializer facility. Link: Osxcart