Property types

Basic Go types

Sgfmill represents Go colours and moves as follows:

Name	Possible values
colour	single-character string: 'b' or 'w'
point	pair (int, int) of coordinates
move	point or None (for a pass)

The terms colour, point, and move are used as above throughout this documentation (in particular, when describing parameters and return types).

colour values are used to represent players, as well as stones on the board. (When a way to represent an empty point is needed, None is used.)

point values are treated as (row, column). The bottom left is (0, 0) (the same orientation as GTP, but not SGF). So the coordinates for a 9x9 board are as follows:

9 (8,0)  .  .  .  .  .  (8,8)
8  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
7  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
6  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
5  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
4  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
3  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
2  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
1 (0,0)  .  .  .  .  .  (0,8)
   A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  J

There are functions in the common module to convert between these coordinates and the conventional (T19-style) notation.

Sgfmill is designed to work with square boards, up to size 26x26.

SGF property types

The following table shows how SGF property types are represented as Python values (eg by the Tree_node.get() and Tree_node.set() methods).

SGF type	Python representation
None	True
Number	int
Real	float
Double	1 or 2 (int)
Colour	colour
SimpleText	string
Text	string
Stone	point
Point	point
Move	move

Sgfmill doesn’t distinguish the Point and Stone SGF property types. It rejects representations of ‘pass’ for the Point and Stone types, but accepts them for Move (this is not what is described in the SGF specification, but it does correspond to the properties in which ‘pass’ makes sense).

Values of list or elist types are represented as Python lists. An empty elist is represented as an empty Python list (in contrast, the raw value is a list containing a single empty string).

Values of compose types are represented as Python pairs (tuples of length two). FG values are either a pair (int, string) or None.

For Text and SimpleText values, get() and set() take care of escaping. You can store arbitrary strings in a Text value and retrieve them unchanged, with the following exceptions:

• all linebreaks are normalised to \n
• whitespace other than line breaks is converted to a single space

get() accepts compressed point lists, but set() never produces them (some SGF viewers still don’t support them).

In some cases, get() will accept values which are not strictly permitted in SGF, if there’s a sensible way to interpret them. In particular, empty lists are accepted for all list types (not only elists).

In some cases, set() will accept values which are not exactly in the Python representation listed, if there’s a natural way to convert them to the SGF representation.

Both get() and set() check that Point values are in range for the board size. Neither get() nor set() pays attention to range restrictions for values of type Number.

Examples:

>>> node.set('KO', True)
>>> node.get_raw('KO')
b''
>>> node.set('HA', 3)
>>> node.set('KM', 5.5)
>>> node.set('GB', 2)
>>> node.set('PL', 'w')
>>> node.set('RE', 'W+R')
>>> node.set('GC', 'Example game\n[for documentation]')
>>> node.get_raw('GC')
b'Example game\n[for documentation\\]'
>>> node.set('B', (2, 3))
>>> node.get_raw('B')
b'dg'
>>> node.set('LB', [((6, 0), "label 1"), ((6, 1), "label 2")])
>>> node.get_raw_list('LB')
[b'ac:label 1', b'bc:label 2']