So I am trying to write a rich text editor in PyGTK, and originally used the older, third party script InteractivePangoBuffer from Gourmet to do this. While it worked alright, there were still plenty of bugs with it which made it frustrating to use at times, so I decided to write my own utilizing text tags. I have got them displaying and generally working alright, but now I am stuck at trying to figure out how to export them to a file when saving. I've seen that others have had the same problem I've had, though I haven't seen any solutions. I haven't come across any function (built in or otherwise) which comes close to actually getting the starting and ending position of each piece of text with a texttag applied to it so I can use it.
I have come up with one idea which should theoretically work, by walking the text by utilizing gtk.TextBuffer.get_iter_at_offset(), gtk.TextIter.get_offset(), gtk.TextIter.begins_tag(), and gtk.TextIter.ends_tag() in order to check each and every character to see if it begins or ends a tag and, if so, put the appropriate code. This would be horribly inefficient and slow, especially on larger documents, however, so I am wondering if anyone has any better solutions?