[FIXED] Waiting certain amount of time with Tkinter

Issue

I have a Tkinter program which I want to pause for 3 seconds. time.sleep doesn't work and the after method doesn't do exactly what I want to.

here is an example code:

from Tkinter import *
def waithere():
    print "waiting..."
root = Tk()

print "1"
root.after(3000,waithere)
print "2"

root.mainloop()

output:

1
2
*3 seconds*
waiting...

the output i want to have:

1
waiting...
*3 seconds*
2

thanks.

Solution

Normally it's a very bad idea to have a GUI wait for something. That's imply not how event-based programs work. Or more accurately, GUIs are already in a perpetual wait state, and you don't want to block that with your own waiting.

That being said, tkinter has a way to wait until certain things happen. For example, you can use one of the "wait" functions, such as wait_variable, wait_window, or wait_visibility.

Assuming that you wanted waithere to do the waiting, you could use wait_variable to do the waiting, and after to set the variable after a given amount of time.

Here's the solution based on your original code:

from Tkinter import *
def waithere():
    var = IntVar()
    root.after(3000, var.set, 1)
    print("waiting...")
    root.wait_variable(var)

root = Tk()

print "1"
waithere()
print "2"

root.mainloop()

The advantage to using these methods is that your code is still able to respond to events while it is waiting.

Answered By - Bryan Oakley