Pygame, copying the screen into an array - pygame

Question

How do you get the screen contents into an array in pygame? I have tried this from the documentation:
self.screen.lock()
tmp_frame = pygame.surfarray.array3d(self.screen)
self.screen.unlock()
I have tried all sorts of things, such as using pixelcopy to get a copy of the surface first, but I always get a segmentation fault.
Fatal Python error: (pygame parachute) Segmentation Fault Aborted
(core dumped)
Is it because I am trying to copy from the screen directly?
This is what screen contains:
self.screen = pygl2d.display.set_mode((self.SCREEN_WIDTH, self.SCREEN_HEIGHT), pygame.DOUBLEBUF, depth=24)
And this is the definition of set_mode:
def set_mode(resolution=(0,0), flags=0, depth=0):
flags |= pygame.OPENGL
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(resolution, flags, depth)
init_gl()
return screen
Edit followup:
I also tried copying the screen surface into another surface first with
tmp_surface= self.screen.copy()
But I get
pygame.error: Cannot copy opengl display
So really, I suppose the question is how do you copy this opengl display contents into an array?

Answer 1

To anyone who might experience something similar:
I was not able to find a direct solution, all methods of accessing the hardware accelerated surface resulted in a segmentation error. (array3d,array2d,accessing a reference array pixels3d etc).
However, I was able to figure out a workaround. It appears that you are able to save images with
pygame.image.save(self.screen, 'output.png')
Similarly, you can do
string_image = pygame.image.tostring(self.screen, 'RGB')
temp_surf = pygame.image.fromstring(string_image,(self.SCREEN_WIDTH, self.SCREEN_HEIGHT),'RGB' )
tmp_arr = pygame.surfarray.array3d(temp_surf)
This should get you a numpy array of the screen contents.

Answer 2

import pygame
import numpy as np
import time
from pandas import *
pygame.init()
display = pygame.display.set_mode((350, 350))
x = np.arange(0, 300)
y = np.arange(0, 300)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y)
Z = X + Y
Z = 255*Z/Z.max()
surf = pygame.surfarray.make_surface(Z)
running = True
while running:
for event in pygame.event.get():
if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
running = False
display.blit(surf, (0, 0))
pygame.display.update()
# Convert the window in black color(2D) into a matrix
window_pixel_matrix = pygame.surfarray.array2d(display)
print(window_pixel_matrix)
time.sleep(10)
pygame.quit()
COMMENT :
"pygame.surfarray.array2d()" is what you're looking for I guess.
Of course, you can use "pygame.surfarray.array3d()" function as well.
You can refer to the official website : "https://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/surfarray.html#pygame.surfarray.array2d"