Proper way to add actions to QTextEdit contextMenuEvent from for loop

Question

I've been scratching my head over this one. I've got a spell-checking module in my program that produces a list of suggestions for misspelled words. I am trying to add these suggestions to the contextMenuEvent of a custom QTextEdit as QActions. The first way I tried was simply to re-use the same variable name for the action in a for loop:

for i in range(11): #only add the first 10 suggestions if more*
      action = QAction(suggestions[i].term) #suggestions[i].term is the string of the suggested word
      action.triggered.connect(lambda: self.replace_word(cursor, suggestions[i].term))
      menu.addAction(action)

This only added the 10th (suggestions[9].term) suggestion to the context menu, so I figured that the variable, "action," was being overwritten each time. I then decided to us a dictionary to create unique actions:

spell_actions = {}
        for i in range(11):
            spell_actions['action% s' % str(i)] = QAction(suggestions[i].term)
            spell_actions['action% s' % str(i)].triggered.connect(lambda: self.replace_word(cursor, suggestions[i].term))
            menu.addAction(spell_actions['action% s' % str(i)])

This resulted in the first 10 suggestions appearing in the context menu. However, when self.replace_word is run, no matter which suggestion was chosen out of the context menu, the word is replaced with the 10th suggestion.

To put it another way, if the context menu has these suggestions:

boat loat load goat moat

No matter which word is chosen from the menu, the word that gets inserted is "moat".

Here's self.replace_word() for reference:

    def replace_word(self, cursor, term):
        self.setTextCursor(cursor)
        self.textCursor().removeSelectedText()
        self.textCursor().insertText(term)

Based on the Googling I've done, using a dictionary should have worked, so I've got to be missing something or misunderstanding something.

Dupe of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72822872/ - python is sometimes surprising for non-python developers. — chehrlic, Feb 04 '23 at 16:25
Thank-you, thank-you! That's exactly it. I was able to pass cursor and term as data attached to the action. Works swell! — Jeremy Wilson, Feb 04 '23 at 17:39

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 04 '23 at 17:41

Thanks to chehrlic pointing me in the right direction, the answer was to avoid using lambda and instead attach cursor and term to the action as data:

spell_actions = {}
            for i in range(11):
                print('action% s' % str(i) + ' | ' + suggestions[i].term)
                spell_actions['action% s' % str(i)] = QAction(suggestions[i].term)
                spell_actions['action% s' % str(i)].setData((cursor, suggestions[i].term))
                spell_actions['action% s' % str(i)].triggered.connect(self.replace_word)

Proper way to add actions to QTextEdit contextMenuEvent from for loop

1 Answers1