Pygame program that can get keyboard input with caps

Question

I have a Pygame program that needs text input. The way it does this is to get keyboard input and when a key is pressed it renders that key so it is added to the screen. Essentially it acts like a text field. The problem is, when you hold shift it doesn't do anything. I relize this is because the program ignores shift input and instead writes the text if it's number is under 128. I have thought of setting a variable when shift is pressed then capitalizing if it was true, but string capitalization only woks on letters, not things like numbers or semicolons. Is there maybe a number I can add to the ascii number typed to modify it if shift is pressed, or something else?
Edit:
Essentially, I just want to know if there is a number to add to ascii characters to make it seem like they were typed with shift held down. After reading over my original question it seemed slightly obscure.

Answer 1

It looks like subtracting 32 should get you what you want, looking at the ASCII table. Make sure you're really dealing with a lowercase letter first though, or you'll get some weird characters. I'm not sure what you mean that capitalization works only on letters:

>>> '1234;!@#abcd'.upper()
'1234;!@#ABCD'

Answer 2

I wrote a function that converts the strings after getting not enough help. It converts everything manually.

Answer 3

Adding this class to your code should do the trick. To get the character the user presses call the getCharacter function from the class. You can alter the if keyPress >= 32 and keyPress <= 126: statement to allow non letter characters to work with shift.

# The pygame module itself...
import pygame

class controls:

    def getKeyPress(self):
      for event in pygame.event.get():
         if event.type == KEYDOWN:    
             return event.key
         else:
             return False


    def getCharacter(self):

      # Check to see if the player has inputed a command
      keyinput = pygame.key.get_pressed()  

      character = "NULL"

      # Get all "Events" that have occurred.
      pygame.event.pump()
      keyPress = self.getKeyPress()

      #If the user presses a key on the keyboard then get the character
      if keyPress >= 32 and keyPress <= 126:
      #If the user presses the shift key while pressing another character then capitalise it
          if keyinput[K_LSHIFT]: 
              keyPress -= 32

          character = chr(keyPress)

      return character 

Answer 4

I can use the 'event.unicode' attribute to get the value of the key typed.