[Tutor] Tkinter: checking a Text widget for contents/changes

Alan Gauld alan.gauld at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Jul 20 23:39:33 CEST 2004


> I'm working on a simple text-editing application, and would like to
> include a function to ask the user to save changes before quitting.
Can
> anyone describe a method for checking to see if anything has been
> entered into a Text widget's buffer

The classic way of doing this is to have a "dirty" flag.
You set it to FAlse at startup and after a save.
On any changes(text entry via keyboard or pasting etc) set
the flag to True.

At exit or Save you can check

if dirty:
   self.SaveFile()

This means you have to bind an event handler to all the
input events plus the load and save events handlers.

Not pretty but thats how its done in all the text editors
I've worked on (that'd be precisely two! :-)

Alan G



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