My nine year old son is applying to participate in a programming contest. Any language is allowed, and he wants to use Scratch. But the application requires an ascii text listing of a program to solve a specified preliminary problem. They will not accept a PNG screenshot, or Scratch's binary format. So how does he get an ascii listing of his program? If it is impossible (as I suspect) then I will just read his program and retype it into an ascii editor.
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Scratch is written in Flash. Any possibility of getting & dumping the SWF? And let the contest hosts know they're behind the times! – Scott Mar 12 '14 at 20:30
3 Answers
You have a few options here.
If you're using Scratch 1.4, you can save a text-only project summary. Shift-click the File menu, then Write project Summary
.
This functionality is coming soon (hopefully) to Scratch 2.0. UPDATE: It has been added.
You can also get a text-based representation of all the blocks using the Scratchblocks generator.
Or, you can save the 2.0 project as myproject.sb2
, rename to myproject.zip
, unpack the ZIP, and take the project.json
file.
Unfortunately, none of these methods can easily be imported back into Scratch.

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http://scratchblocks.github.io will convert your project into scratchblocks format. It is exactly what you are looking for.

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This is great, because then it exports to both code you can visually see or simple readable code you can load in to the editor. – Aqua the SeaWing Feb 23 '15 at 23:21
You can download and edit the json script for the Scratch project. It can then be uploaded to replace the existing project. (This is also a great way to back-up and deploy projects)
- From the "See Inside" screen, File->Download to your computer.
- Rename the file to have a ".zip" extension instead of just ".sb2".
- Unzip the file to edit the "project.json" file.
- Edit the json code as desired.
- Reassemble the zip file
- Remove the ".zip" extension. (Back to ".sb2")
- Update the Scratch project by going to the original project and selecting File->Upload from your computer.

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