Copying when nothing is selected no longer affects the clipboard.

[stephenshank]

Fixes #2835

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My first attempt at contributing to open source... constructive criticism welcome!

[goanpeca]

Thanks for the contribution

In python saying

if len(self.get_selected_text()) > 0 is the same as if len(self.get_selected_text()): cause if len is 0 then it is the same as saying False.

So we use the second version (as it is common practice in Python)

You can try doing:

bool(0)
bool(1)
bool(100)
bool(-450)

[ccordoba12]

@stephenshank, thanks a lot for your contribution! What you did is exactly what it needed to be done, so well job :-)

What @goanpeca meant is that removing > 0 in the code you added is all we require from you to merge this because in Python there's no need of that further check.

I think even if self.get_selected_text() is a right solution because if there's no selected text, then self.get_selected_text() will return an empty string, and in Python if '' (like if [] for empty lists) returns False.

[stephenshank]

Thanks to both of you for your feedback! After experimenting with %timeit, I ended up going with
if self.get_selected_text():
since this gave the most favorable performance among the three variations (and still resolved the issue with the clipboard, of course).

[ccordoba12]

Ok, your first contribution to open source is going in ;-)

[ccordoba12]

Please notice that this fix is going to be available since Spyder 3.0 beta3, and not in the 2.3.x series (2.3.9 is the next planned release :-)

[Nodd]

Welcome to a whole new world ! 😄

I jusst have a remark about your reasoning. In non critical parts, the correct code isn't usually determined by %timeit (even if this result is interesting in itself). In that case performance matters less that maintainability and coherency. Having a better performance is of course a plus, but the user will never notice if Ctrl+C is 0.1ms slower or faster.

if self.get_selected_text(): is more pythonic, which means that it's the less surprising form to someone used to python, so it will be easier in the future to understand, debug or modify.

[stephenshank]

Great news! Thanks so much! I can see that I clearly have a lot to learn from this community... you can expect to see more pull requests from me in the future.