How to Get If a Key Is Pressed Pygame

How to get keyboard input in pygame?

You can get the events from pygame and then watch out for the KEYDOWN event, instead of looking at the keys returned by get_pressed()(which gives you keys that are currently pressed down, whereas the KEYDOWN event shows you which keys were pressed down on that frame).

What's happening with your code right now is that if your game is rendering at 30fps, and you hold down the left arrow key for half a second, you're updating the location 15 times.

events = pygame.event.get()
for event in events:
    if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
        if event.key == pygame.K_LEFT:
            location -= 1
        if event.key == pygame.K_RIGHT:
            location += 1

To support continuous movement while a key is being held down, you would have to establish some sort of limitation, either based on a forced maximum frame rate of the game loop or by a counter which only allows you to move every so many ticks of the loop.

move_ticker = 0
keys=pygame.key.get_pressed()
if keys[K_LEFT]:
    if move_ticker == 0:
        move_ticker = 10
        location -= 1
        if location == -1:
            location = 0
if keys[K_RIGHT]:
    if move_ticker == 0:   
        move_ticker = 10     
        location+=1
        if location == 5:
            location = 4

Then somewhere during the game loop you would do something like this:

if move_ticker > 0:
    move_ticker -= 1

This would only let you move once every 10 frames (so if you move, the ticker gets set to 10, and after 10 frames it will allow you to move again)

How to detect a key-press with pygame?

pygame.K_w is not an event type, but a key. You need to verify that the event type is pygame.KEYDOWN and the key is pygame.K_w:

while running:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            running = False
        if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
            if event.key== pygame.K_w:
                # [...]

The keyboard events KEYDOWN and KEYUP (see pygame.event module) create a pygame.event.Event object with additional attributes. The key that was pressed can be obtained from the key attribute (e.g. K_RETURN , K_a) and the mod attribute contains a bitset with additional modifiers (e.g. KMOD_LSHIFT). The unicode attribute provides the Unicode representation of the keyboard input.

Getting Pygame keyboard input and check if it's a number

pygame.key.get_pressed() returns a list with the state of all keyboard buttons. This is not intended to get the key of a keyboard event. The key that was pressed can be obtained from the key attribute of the pygame.event.Event object:

if event.type == pg.KEYDOWN:
    if event.key == pg.K_a:
        # [...] 

unicode contains a single character string that is the fully translated character:

if event.type == pg.KEYDOWN:
    if event.unicode == 'a':
        # [...] 

See also pygame.key.

How do I check for two keyboard keys being pressed at the same time with pygame?

Use pygame.key.get_pressed() to get the state of all keyboard buttons.

keys = pygame.key.get_pressed()
if keys[pygame.K_a] and keys[pygame.K_ESCAPE]:
    # [...]

Check the state of the keys when the KEYDOWN event occurs on one of the keys (a or ESC):

for event in pygame.event.get():
    # [...]

    if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
        if event.key == pygame.K_a or event.key == pygame.K_ESCAPE: # <--- or 

            keys = pygame.key.get_pressed()
            if keys[pygame.K_a] and keys[pygame.K_ESCAPE]:
                print("a and ESC")

The same combined in a single condition:

event_list = pygame.event.get()
keys = pygame.key.get_pressed()
for event in event_list:
    # [...]        

    if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN and \
        ((event.key == pygame.K_a and keys[pygame.K_ESCAPE]) or \
        (event.key == pygame.K_ESCAPE and keys[pygame.K_a])):
        
        print("a and ESC")

Note: pygame.event.get() must be called before pygame.key.get_pressed(), since the states of the keys returned by pygame.event.get() are set when the events are evaluated.

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