Interval value in pyautogui.press() not working

Question

I have a script where I have to press different keys on the keyboard using PyAutoGui.

pyautogui.press(['alt','y','2','v','tab','enter'], interval=1)

I need the code to press every key with 1 second of delay between each press, but for some reason the interval value isn't being recognized and press them all at once (I believe there's a 0.1 seconds of delay by default)

I've done it doing this:

pyautogui.press('alt')
time.sleep(1)
pyautogui.press('y')
time.sleep(1)
pyautogui.press('2')
time.sleep(1)
pyautogui.press('v')
time.sleep(1)
pyautogui.press('tab')
time.sleep(1)
pyautogui.press('enter')

But it takes a lot of lines and looks horrible (in my opinion)

Answer 1

The interval argument in pyautogui.press does not do what you think it does. If we inspect the function definition...

...
for i in range(presses):
    for k in keys:
        failSafeCheck()
        platformModule._keyDown(k)
        platformModule._keyUp(k)
    time.sleep(interval)

This shows us that the interval is actually a pause between the entire key sequence. For example, let us say you want to press a, b, c twice, with 1 second between each abc. You can use pyautogui.press(['a', 'b', 'c'], presses=2, interval=1), and you'll get

abc # no pause between a, b, c 
# 1 second pause
abc # no pause between a, b, c

To enforce an interval between each key in the list, try using pyautogui.hotkey as such:

pyautogui.hotkey('a', 'b', 'c', interval=0.5)

The caveat here being that the keyUp also has an interval, so you get a significant pause at the end of the function as well.