Find specific widget at tkinter inferface

Question

I know that there's another question like this but this one is not a duplicate.

The problem is to find a specific widget (or widgets) by its type, maybe that required widget is not a sub-widget.

I make this question because i did not find something like this (did not search too much) and can be useful to someone.

Give an example of what you mean by "_find a specific widget (or widgets) by its type_". There are lots of global methods inside of `tkinter` for this — Delrius Euphoria, Jan 20 '21 at 00:26
It might be for some specific use cases, for example when you have two frames (frame_p1), in this one you have a notebook and into it another frame with other stuff, in the frame_p2 you have anything else and you need to do something with any widget inside the notebook and don't want to use an intermediary to communicate them but you know what are you looking for but not how to find it. I'm not an expert using Tkinter or Python, i thought that someone can have the same problem and this is a posible way to solve it, that's all... If this is not a good practice, then will delete the question. — Merrydjff, Jan 20 '21 at 01:56

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 19 '21 at 22:55

Basically, because it’s no way to know if the required widget is a sub-widget, it’s not a bad idea to start from root.

# This function receives a widget and iterates to find root
def get_root(widget):
    parent_name = ''
    while parent_name != '.':  # root widget's name is '.'
        parent_name = widget.winfo_parent()  # Here get the current widget parent
        widget = widget._nametowidget(parent_name)  # Using the name, it turns into a widget

    # Returns root widget
    return widget

Once the root reference is obtained, then search all sub-widgets (children), the following method is from this question:

# This function returns a list of desired widgets
def find_widget(some_widget, desired_widget):
    root = get_root(some_widget)  # Obtains root
    _list = root.winfo_children()  # Obtains root's children
    desired_widget_list = []  #  Here will be all the widgets that match with your desired widget type
    for item in _list:
        #  If some widget have children, then all of them will be append into _list
        if item.winfo_children():
            _list.extend(item.winfo_children())  # Appending widgets

        #  If some type widget in _list match with your desired widget
        #  then it will be inserted into desired_widget_list
        if '!' + desired_widget in str(item):
            desired_widget_list.insert(len(desired_widget_list), item)

    #  Return a list that contains all widgets that match with your desired widget type
    return desired_widget_list

Just need to have a reference of some widget that belongs the GUI and the widget type. It can be used like this:

find_widget(some_frame, 'frame')
find_widget(some_treeview, 'treeview')

Find specific widget at tkinter inferface

1 Answers1