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Under some circumstances which I don't understand, gtk.Entry.paste_clipboard() breaks future operations on the Entry's contents. I wrote up a more detailed question here, which didn't get any responses. My question is, why does paste_clipboard break things so badly, and is there a way to prevent that breakage?

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GTK experience: almost none.

Hello.

There are 2 problems with your code.

The first problem arises from the fact that paste_clipboard() method doesn't do any text manipulation but just emits "paste-clipboard" signal. It's the default handler for gtk.Entry's "paste-clipboard" signal that does the real work. But before that handler is called, gtk takes care of all pending events with higher priority. This is why you get empty txt when printing - since nothing has been added to the gtk.Entry yet.

The usual method to handle these kind of situations is to process all the events inside you function with this construct:

But here comes the second problem. This method resolves the problem when the application is written in C, but pygtk seems to be "immune" to that call (I'm no pygtk expert, so I cannot tell you why exactly this construct is not working here).

BTW, your last method that resolved your problem works as expected because no fiddling with events is done - the text is retrieved and inserted at the exact moment you call your functions.

Thanks for the explanation. I wonder why the DevHelp docs said absolutely nothing about the event part of your explanation.

Oh well, it's not important anymore. I'm now filtering the clipboard contents before inserting them into the GetEntry, so gtk.Clipboard.wait_for_text() is a better approach now.

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GTK experience: almost none.

These kind of things are usually undocumented and you need to dig through the gtk's source code to unearth them - the price we sometimes need to pay for getting top class GUI toolkit for free.