Typing Greek characters in tkinter

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I'm trying to write an interface (in Python 3.8, using tkinter) to accept text in Greek (typed using the Greek Polytonic keyboard in Windows 10). However, the Entry and Text won't accept all typed Greek characters: Greek letters by themselves can be typed, but if I try to type any letters with diacritics other than the acute accent, ? is displayed instead of the character. (I think that tkinter accepts characters in the "Greek and Coptic" but not the "Greek Extended" Unicode block.) I know that tkinter can display such characters because they show up fine when they're inserted by the program (e.g. TextInstance.insert(tkinter.INSERT, 'ῆ') inserts ῆ but just typing that character using the keyboard's shortcut inserts ?). What do I need to do for tkinter to recognize typed Greek characters?

(I also tried just re-binding the keyboard shortcuts by adding
TextInstance.bind('[h', lambda *ignored: TextInstance.insert(tkinter.INSERT, 'ῆ'))
with each character and its shortcut; that worked in the English keyboard (although the characters that activated the event were also inserted), but in the Greek Polytonic keyboard bindings on letter keys weren't activated at all.)

diacritics unicode python-3.x tkinter python
1 Answers

You can do this by binding '<Key>' (that is, the pressing of any key on the keyboard) to a function that then checks what key was pressed using event.keycode (which has the same value for any given key no matter what keyboard your computer is set to use) and then inserts the intended character. However, with multi-key keyboard shortcuts you have to keep track of previous keystrokes, because the event object passed to the function may only include the last one: even if you bind, for instance, widget.bind('<Control-Key-c>', some_function), the event passed to the function will include the c but not the Control key -- at least in the event.keycode, and the event's other attributes aren't necessarily reliable or informative when the keyboard doesn't work with tkinter. To bind /a to ἄ (lowercase alpha with a smooth breathing and accent mark), I added each '<Key>' event to a list and set the function to insert the character only if the right combination of keys was pressed:

import tkinter as tk

root=tk.Tk()
e=tk.Entry(root); e.pack()
keyspressed=[]
def pressKey(event,widget):
    keyspressed.append(event)
    print(event.keycode, event.char, "pressed.")

    if len(keyspressed)>1: #to avoid an index-out-of-range error if only one key has been pressed so far
        #if the last two keys were / and A, insert ἄ i.e. /u1f04
        if keyspressed[-2].keycode==191 and keyspressed[-2].char!='/' and event.keycode==65:
            #65 is A; 191 is /; the char check is to make sure the / is not being used
            # to type / on a different keyboard.
            widget.insert(tk.INSERT,'\u1f04') #insert the character
            return 'break' #this stops ? from being typed

e.bind("<Key>",lambda event: pressKey(event, e))

root.mainloop()
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