How to get tkinter OptionMenu to display the name of the selected option?

Question

In tkinter, I have created an option menu using the OptionMenu class. As an example, the OptionMenu below has options A, B, C, D, etc.:

self.clicked = tk.StringVar(self.parent)
self.clicked.set("Select Column")

self.drop = tk.OptionMenu(self.parent, self.clicked, 'Select Column', command=self.idle)
    for i in columnNames[:]:
        self.drop['menu'].add_command(label=i, command=tk._setit(self.clicked, i, self.select_data))
self.drop.pack()

Note: the function self.idle is just a lambda *args: None.

The function self.select_data is as follows:

def select_data(self):
    for col_name in df.columns:
        if col_name == self.clicked.get():
            self.option_display = col_name

The function self.select_data simply retrieves the option the user selects from the OptionMenu, but how would I update the OptionMenu to display the option selected in self.select_data?

As an example, if the user selects option A, how would I update the OptionMenu to show Aas selected?

In your case, `self.selectData()` should expect a argument which is the selected item. — acw1668, Jun 17 '20 at 05:47
What argument exactly? I'm a bit confused...in `self.selectData()`, I'm trying to print out the selected option from the OptionMenu. — ephemeralhappiness, Jun 17 '20 at 06:12
The `selectData` function should be something like that: `def selectData(self, selected)` where `selected` will be the selected item of the `OptionMenu`. Or you can use `self.clicked.get()` inside the function to get the selected item. — acw1668, Jun 17 '20 at 06:20
If I were to do `def selectData(self, selected)`, would the code inside simply be `print(selected.get())` by calling `self.selectData(self.clicked)`. Also, the `self.clicked.get()` worked for me. — ephemeralhappiness, Jun 17 '20 at 06:28

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 17 '20 at 06:32

1

The selectData() function should have the following signature:

def selectData(self, selected):
    print(selected)
    # or print(self.clicked.get())

answered Jun 17 '20 at 06:32

acw1668

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 17 '20 at 06:25

This will print the dropdown selection to the console. but my suggestion is to avoid console in GUI based applications. create a text indicator and print output to it

from tkinter import *
tk = Tk()
def OptionMenu_SelectionEvent(event):
    print(var.get())
    pass
var = StringVar(); var.set("one")
options = ["one", "two", "three"]
OptionMenu(tk, var, *(options), command = OptionMenu_SelectionEvent).pack()
tk.mainloop()

How to get tkinter OptionMenu to display the name of the selected option?

2 Answers2