Python TKinter get clicked tag in text widget

Question

i have some tags in a text widget and bound a click function to all of them.

My example sentence is "my cute, little cat". "Cute" and "little" are the tagged words with the tag adj.

In this click function i can not figure out the way to get the string i clicked. When i click on cute i want to print cute to the console.

This is what i have so far, i did not include how i apply the tag, since this works. The click function is called correctly.

    def __init__(self, master):
        # skipped some stuff here
        self.MT.tag_config('adj', foreground='orange')
        # here i bind the click function
        self.MT.tag_bind('adj', '<Button-1>', self.click)

    def click(self, event):
        print(dir(event))
        # i want to print the clicked tag text here

Is there a way to do this?

Best, Michael

IDontKnow · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-27 12:16:50Z

6

I managed to extract the text of the clicked label from the cursor position. I converted it to an index and checked for the tag that covered the index.

Here is my solution:

    def click(self, event):
        # get the index of the mouse click
        index = self.MT.index("@%s,%s" % (event.x, event.y))

        # get the indices of all "adj" tags
        tag_indices = list(self.MT.tag_ranges('adj'))

        # iterate them pairwise (start and end index)
        for start, end in zip(tag_indices[0::2], tag_indices[1::2]):
            # check if the tag matches the mouse click index
            if self.MT.compare(start, '<=', index) and self.MT.compare(index, '<', end):
                # return string between tag start and end
                return (start, end, self.MT.get(start, end))

answered Nov 27, 2015 at 12:16

IDontKnow

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1 Comment

TheLizzard Aug 14, 2025 at 8:42

Instead of using event.widget.tag_ranges('adj'), it might be better to use event.widget.tag_names(index). This will remove the need for the for loop and all of those event.widget.compare calls making the function much faster.

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