PyQt - How to turn on/off spellcheck highlighting

Question

I have a button which sets/unsets spellcheck highlighting in a QTextEdit box (ref PyQt - How to turn on/off spellchecking) which works fine.

Then I added a language selection QComboBox and tied its signal to the button's property but its highlighting set/unset doesn't work on changing the language. It drives me nuts, there may be something small and stupid I've done, but for the sake of it I can't find anything wrong with it.

The button (action rather) is

self.actionSpellCheck = QAction(QIcon(self.icon_spellcheck),
            "Auto &Spellcheck", self,
            shortcut=Qt.CTRL + Qt.SHIFT + Qt.Key_O,
            triggered=self.spellcheck, checkable=True)

The combobox is

self.cb_lang = QComboBox(tb)
    tb.addWidget(self.cb_lang)
    lang_list = self.dict_broker.list_languages()
    self.cb_lang.addItems(lang_list)
    self.cb_lang.currentIndexChanged.connect(self.spellcheck)

and the self.spellcheck is

def spellcheck(self):
    pos = self.cursor.position()
    if self.actionSpellCheck.isChecked():
        lang = self.cb_lang.currentText()
        self.dict = self.dict_broker.request_dict(lang)
        self.highlighter.setDict(self.dict)
        self.setHighlighterEnabled(True)
        self.show_status("Spellcheck language is set to " + self.dict.tag, None)
    else:
        self.setHighlighterEnabled(False)
        self.highlighter.setDict(None)
        self.show_status("Spellcheck is turned off", None)
    self.cursor.setPosition(pos, QTextCursor.MoveAnchor)
    self.textEdit.setTextCursor(self.cursor)
    self.textEdit.setFocus()

How come the highlighter gets set/unset on clicking the button, but nothing happens on selecting the language (it only happens after I start typing, not immediately on combobox selection)? Thank you.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 05 '12 at 18:54

If you look at the HighLighter.setDict method, you'lll see that it doesn't do much other than reassign the dict attribute.

Also, the SpellTextEdit.setHighlighterEnabled only resets the document.

So you're going to need a method to re-highlight the text whenever the dict changes. Fortunately, HighLighter is a subclass of QSyntaxHighlighter, which already has a rehighlight slot which does what is required.

So you just need to amend your spellcheck method as follows:

def spellcheck(self):
    pos = self.cursor.position()
    if self.actionSpellCheck.isChecked():
        self.setHighlighterEnabled(True)
        lang = self.cb_lang.currentText()
        self.dict = self.dict_broker.request_dict(lang)
        self.highlighter.setDict(self.dict)
        self.highlighter.rehighlight()
    else:
        ...

I'll try that. But as I said, it works fine even without rehighlight() when I press the button. I don't understand why the combobox change doesn't work if it uses exactly the same method? — linuxoid, Jan 05 '12 at 23:37
Yes, it works now when I change language in the combobox. Thank you very much. — linuxoid, Jan 05 '12 at 23:41

PyQt - How to turn on/off spellcheck highlighting

1 Answers1