betterwinreg 1.0.0

A sane way of working with the Windows registry

betterwinreg

A sane way of working with the Windows registry.

Getting a RegistryKey instance

To get a RegistryKey instance, simply do:

from betterwinreg.key import RegistryKey
key = RegistryKey('HKEY_MY_HKEY/Path/To/Key/You/Want')

You can also use backslashes:

key = RegistryKey('HKEY_MY_KEY\\Path\\To\\Key\\You\\Want')

Or, if you don't want to escape every backslash, you can use raw strings:

key = RegistryKey(r'HKEY_MY_KEY\Path\To\Key\You\Want')

Getting values

You can get a specific value by using a dict-like syntax:

my_value = key['Value']

You can also iterate though all the values a key has:

for name, value in key.values().items():
    # do some stuff

For example, you would get the wallpaper path by doing:

wallpaper_path = RegistryKey(r'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop')['WallPaper']

Note that getting a value returns a special object that represents the registry type. You can use it normally, but doing stuff with it will make it a regular instance of the base type.

>>> RegistryKey(r'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop')['WallPaper']
Sz('D:\\Pictures\\wallpaper.png')

Setting and deleting values

Since registry types are different than Python types, you need to specify what type the registry value will be set to.

from betterwinreg.value import Sz
RegistryKey(r'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop')['WallPaper'] = Sz(r'D:\Pictures\wallpaper.png')

To delete a value, you can use del:

del RegistryKey(r'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Shell\git_shell')['WallPaper']

Navigating through the registry

The main ways to move through the registry are using subkeys() and parent, and concatenating in a Path-like way.

>>> RegistryKey(r'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop').parent
RegistryKey('HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Control Panel')

>>> RegistryKey(r'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop').subkeys()
[RegistryKey('HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Control Panel\\Desktop\\Colors'), RegistryKey('HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Control Panel\\Desktop\\WindowMetrics'), RegistryKey('HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Control Panel\\Desktop\\MuiCached')]

You can also join RegistryKeys in a Path-like manner:

>>> RegistryKey(r'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel') / 'Desktop'
RegistryKey('HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Control Panel\\Desktop')

Notes

Only tested on Windows 10 64-bit. It won't work on 32-bit, because of some incompatible API calls (e.g. RegDeleteKeyEx).