tkinter and time.sleep

Crispy picture Crispy · May 1, 2012 · Viewed 34.6k times · Source

I am trying to delete text inside a text box after waiting 5 seconds, but instead the program wont run and does sleep over everything else. Also is there a way for me to just make my textbox sleep so i can run other code while the text is frozen?

from time import time, sleep
from Tkinter import *

def empty_textbox():
    textbox.insert(END, 'This is a test')
    sleep(5)
    textbox.delete("1.0", END)

root = Tk()

frame = Frame(root, width=300, height=100)
textbox = Text(frame)

frame.pack_propagate(0)
frame.pack()
textbox.pack()

empty_textbox()

root.mainloop()

Answer

srgerg picture srgerg · May 1, 2012

You really should be using something like the Tkinter after method rather than time.sleep(...).

There's an example of using the after method at this other stackoverflow question.

Here's a modified version of your script that uses the after method:

from time import time, sleep
from Tkinter import *

def empty_textbox():
    textbox.delete("1.0", END)

root = Tk()

frame = Frame(root, width=300, height=100)
textbox = Text(frame)

frame.pack_propagate(0)
frame.pack()
textbox.pack()

textbox.insert(END, 'This is a test')
textbox.after(5000, empty_textbox)

root.mainloop()