python tkinter how to change the label of a widget on a particular grid space?

Question

I have a 3x3 grid of buttons, all of which are bound to the same event funciton. This function changes the labels of particular buttons, based on which button was clicked. I want to be able to choose which buttons will be effected by looking at where they fall on the grid, ie row and column values.

For example, I want to be able to say "considering the button clicked was on (row 1, column 2), I want to change the labels of the buttons on (row 2, column 0) and (row 1, column 1).

I know how to find the row and column of the button which was clicked:

import tkinter

def click(event):
    space = event.widget
    space_label = space['text']
    row = space.grid_info()['row'] #get the row of clicked button
    column = space.grid_info()['column'] #get the column of clicked button

board = tkinter.Tk()

for i in range(0,9): #creates the 3x3 grid of buttons

    button = tkinter.Button(text = "0")

    if i in range(0,3):
        r = 0
    elif i in range(3,6):
        r = 1
    else:
        r = 2

    button.grid(row = r, column = i%3)
    button.bind("<Button-1>",click)

board.mainloop()

But I can't figure out how to access a button's label given only a row and column of the grid.

PS new to coding, sorry if this is obvious, i looked around but couldn't find any similar enough questions.

Answer 1

If you plan to do anything with a widget after creating it and adding it to your interface, it's a good idea to keep a reference.

Here is a modification of your code that creates a dictionary button_dict to store each of your buttons. The keys are tuples (row,column) . I added the button_dict as an additional input to your click function and modified the button binding to include this new input using lambda .

import tkinter

def click(event,button_dict):
    space = event.widget
    space_label = space['text']
    row = space.grid_info()['row'] #get the row of clicked button
    column = space.grid_info()['column'] #get the column of clicked button

    button = button_dict[(row,column)] # Retrieve our button using the row/col
    print(button['text']) # Print button text for demonstration

board = tkinter.Tk()

button_dict = {} # Store your button references here

for i in range(0,9): #creates the 3x3 grid of buttons

    button = tkinter.Button(text = i) # Changed the text for demonstration

    if i in range(0,3):
        r = 0
    elif i in range(3,6):
        r = 1
    else:
        r = 2

    button.grid(row = r, column = i%3)
    button.bind("<Button-1>",lambda event: click(event,button_dict))

    button_dict[(r,i%3)] = button # Add reference to your button dictionary

board.mainloop()

If you were only interested in the button that was pressed, you can simply access the event.widget attribute. From your example, it sounds like you want to modify any number of buttons on each event so I think the dictionary will give you more versatility.