How to get a TkInter file selection dialogbox to work with IPython / Spyder?

Question

I am trying to create a simple file selection dialog for one of my scripts and I was trying to use the code examples from this thread: Quick and easy file dialog in Python?

import Tkinter, tkFileDialog

root = Tkinter.Tk()
root.withdraw()

file_path = tkFileDialog.askopenfilename()

I also tried using the easygui module that uses Tkinter to do the same thing. In both cases, the code above hangs the IPython console. I gather that this has something to do with event loops, but I have no real experience with GUIs in Python.

Could someone point me in the right direction on how to get a dialogbox for file selection to work with IPython/Spyder. For the record, I am on Python 2.7.6 and IPython 2.4.1

Answer 1

Before running the code above, you need to set the right event loop (in this case Tk), as you correctly guessed.

To do that you need to run this command:

In [1]: %gui tk

and then run your code.

Note: To access the documentation about the %gui magic in Spyder, you need to place the cursor in front of %gui and press Ctrl+I, like this

In [1]: %gui<Ctrl+I>