How to Create A Message Box in Python - Tkinter

Key Takeaways

Hey guys, and welcome back to another YouTube video. So, I just want to start off by apologizing. I haven't been posting uh for about the past 5 days. I've been extremely busy and I haven't found the time to record any videos. So, I'm trying to get this one out for you guys today. And I am working on doing a whole series on what I'm going to be showing you, which is Tkinter. So, hopefully I'm going to have a tutorial series for that out in about a week or so. Uh but for now, it's a little sneak peek on some of the things you can do using a Tkinter uh module in Pygame. Now, this video is going to go over how to uh create a message box in Tkinter in Python. Sorry, not Pygame, Python. Although this can be used in Pygame as well. And it's extremely useful is a lot of times you want to display information to the user. You want to ask them a question, but you don't want to create your own form for that. You just want to have a simple line that you can type in that's going to allow you to do that. So, I'm going to show you an example here quickly of what I mean. So, for example, we have this message box that pops up. It says question and then do you have brown hair? And obviously you would say yes or no for this. Uh this is just an example where it has the option to click okay. So that would just be something where you're showing information to the user. So let's get started right away uh with the tutorial on how to do this. I'm going to be showing you all different kinds of message boxes and the if you want to skip about a minute or two in uh that's where I'm going to be talking about the question message boxes where it says yes no for example. Okay. So we want to start here by just importing these two uh these two things up here. So we have from tkinter import star. This means import everything. And then from tkinter import message box. So this just means that we don't have to type tkinter messagebox every single time. Uh so make sure you have those two lines. And then we're going to set up our main window. Now this window is actually going to be invisible, but pretty much whenever you want to do anything in tkinter, you have to have a window set up. So we just set up the window to start so that we can make it disappear so that it's you'll see what I mean in just a second. I'll show you. So we say window equals TK uh window. val. All this is going to do here, this line, if you want to copy it out, is simply going to put our window in the middle of the screen on the top level of everything. So that means that once we open up the window, once we have the program, it's not going to be hidden behind another window. It's going to make sure it's uh as for as far in front as possible. Uh a lot of times what'll happen if you don't put this is it's going to end up be behind something and you're not going to be able to see it. So this is a really useful line to put. And then we're just going to withdraw our window. What this does is it's going to make our window invisible. So, it's still going to be on the top level. We're just not going to be able to see it. Um, so that the all we're going to see is the message box when it pops up. So, if I get rid of this line here, I'll show you what I mean in case anybody's confused. Uh, pretty much you see we have this ugly little window behind. Uh, so we want to make that disappear. So, that's why we do withdraw. Okay. The next line here is the line that's actually going to show our message box. So, to do any message box starts off with message box dot and then show. You can also do show error, show warning. Uh these are just the different kind of icons that you can use. And it's going to say uh this is going to be our title here on the first set of uh quotations. Then a comma and then the context or the text that's going to be on it. So you saw mine if I ran the program here. Uh we have this the title and then thing here. And it's the little info icon. Now, if you wanted to show an error, you would type show error. And all that this does is it changes a little icon to an X showing an error. The other one that they have is show warning. Like that. There you go. Uh the warning sign. So, those are the three different icons for the uh text boxes. These last lines here, these just make sure that we're quitting our window once we are finished so that it's no longer shown on the screen. Uh, so make sure you put this in at the bottom. Usually all I do is window.quit, but these two just ensure that everything's gone. Okay. After that, um, now I'm going to show you guys how we can ask the question. So ask yes or no. So for example, this question here, do you have brown hair? Really, it should, uh, it shouldn't just say okay. We should be able to answer yes or no. So to be able to do that, we're going to say messagebox dot then ask, and we're just going to say yes, no. So this is going to ask a yes no question. And it's just going to allow us to have the buttons yes, no on our thing. You can see here, do you have brown hair? And now we're able to answer with either a yes or a no. Now, the thing is though, we can answer the question, but how do we actually check the answer? Because right now, uh, nothing's happening. It's just we're simply clicking the button and then the window disappears. So to do so, all you have to do is before your message box, you do if. So now we're just going to be checking if the result of this message box is equal to true meaning it's equal to yes then we'll simply print we'll say uh yes otherwise we will print no and then that way we're able to get the answer to our question. So, if we click uh run the program, do you have brown hair? Click no. It says no there. Again, if we do this one more time, do you have brown hair? I click yes. Yes. There you are. So, that's uh pretty useful there. Now, say you wanted this to be a different icon. So, you saw we had a little info icon there. If you click if you do a little comma at the end and you say icon, you can set it equal to what you like. So, info warning or uh error like so. And then that way it'll change the icon for you. So, now you see that we have the little air icon here. Now, these are really useful uh just in a bunch of programs to be able to use and you'll find them really uh helpful if you just want to ask a simple question to the user and you don't want to create a new form. The other types of message box that we can do is we can say ask okay cancel. So this is going to be a similar thing. Uh if you click okay gives you the yes because that's the true like I don't know that's how it works. And same thing if you click cancel then it gives you no. We can also ask one other type for these little questions which is retry or cancel. So there you have we have the buttons changed now to retry or cancel. Again if you click retry that that returns true from the message box. So yeah, that's pretty much been my tutorial on how to create a message box in Python using Tkinter. If you guys have any questions, feel free to leave them down below. I'll be sure to try to respond to those. And make sure you hit that like button and subscribe to the channel for more content. [Music]