Save and restore terminal window conent using Curses for Python

I’m making some console app on Python with Curses (window-curses) library. At some point I need to save window state (or maybe whole terminal state) to some object/variable and restore it in future.
What’s the proper way to do this?

I found methods in module documentaion which do this via saving state to the file. But maybe there exists some other way to do this in memory.

>Solution :

As you found, you can use things like the putwin function to save a pad to a file and getwin to restore it from a file. If you want to keep this in memory, rather than a file on disk, you can use a BytesIO object in place of a real file handle.

import io
import curses
curses.initscr()
pad = curses.newpad(100, 100)
# ... do things with the pad

# save the pad in memory
f = io.BytesIO()
pad.putwin(f)


# later recall the data
f.seek(0)  # reset the cursor to the beginning of the "file"
pad.getwin(f)

You could also write some functions to describe this another way:

def save_win(win) -> bytes:
    f = io.BytesIO()
    win.putwin(f)
    bytes_data = f.getvalue()
    return bytes_data


def load_win(bytes_data: bytes) -> curses.window:
    f = io.BytesIO(bytes_data)
    f.seek(0)
    return curses.getwin(f)