对于 TK inter 上的 tk.Text 小部件，ttk.Entry 小部件上的 textvariable 是否有替代方案？

Question

so according to Tkinter documentation, the purpose of an Entry widget is to allow the user to enter or edit a single line of text . I want to get enter and Edit multiple lines of text but there is a problem. The alternative suggested by tkinter, Text, doesn't do the job at all!

here is my code using ttk.Entry:

   def _set_project_description_frame(self):
        project_description_frame = ttk.Frame(self._main_frame)
        ttk.Label(project_description_frame, text="Project Description").pack(side=tk.TOP, anchor="nw")
        ttk.Entry(project_description_frame, textvariable=self._project_description).pack(side=tk.LEFT,
                                                                                          expand=True, fill=tk.X)
        return project_description_frame

This produces the following tkinter output:

but what I really wan is to have the description section actually look like a place where a description would go, so I replaced ttk.Entry with tk.Text:

def _set_project_description_frame(self):
    project_description_frame = ttk.Frame(self._main_frame)
    ttk.Label(project_description_frame, text="Project Description").pack(side=tk.TOP, anchor="nw")
    tk.Text(project_description_frame, height=5).pack(side=tk.LEFT, expand=True, fill=tk.X)
    return project_description_frame

The result shown in the picture bellow:

The last result is exactly what I want but the problem is that without the passing textvariable=self._project_description to tk.Text it's impossible to actually save whatever is typed into that text field.

So my question is, how do I fix the code in order to be able to capture what's input into the text field the same way ttk.Entry does when I can't pass textvariable=self._project_description to it?

Answer 1

The Text widget doesn't support textvariable because a Text widget can contain more than just text. To get the content out of the Text widget you need to call the get method on the widget.

To get all of the contents of the widget you first need to keep a reference to the widget. Then it's just a matter of calling get with an index for the range of text you want. Typically the two indexes will be the strings "1.0" for the first character, and "end-1c" for the last character before the newline added by the text widget itself.

def _set_project_description_frame(self):
    ...
    self.text_widget = tk.Text(project_description_frame, height=5)
    self.text_widget.pack(side=tk.LEFT, expand=True, fill=tk.X)
    ...

With that, anywhere else in your code that needs to fetch the data can do this:

self.text_widget.get("1.0", "end-1c")