Getting a callback when a Tkinter Listbox selectio

Question

There are a number of ways of getting callbacks when Text or Entry widgets are changed in Tkinter, but I haven't found one for Listbox's (it doesn't help that much of the event documentation I can find is old or incomplete). Is there some way of generating an event for this?

Answer 1

def onselect(evt):
    # Note here that Tkinter passes an event object to onselect()
    w = evt.widget
    index = int(w.curselection()[0])
    value = w.get(index)
    print 'You selected item %d: "%s"' % (index, value)

lb = Listbox(frame, name='lb')
lb.bind('<<ListboxSelect>>', onselect)

Answer 2

You can bind to:

<<ListboxSelect>>

Answer 3

I had the problem that I needed to get the last selected item in a listbox with selectmode=MULTIPLE. In case someone else has the same problem, here is what I did:

lastselectionList = []
def onselect(evt):
    # Note here that Tkinter passes an event object to onselect()
    global lastselectionList
    w = evt.widget
    if lastselectionList: #if not empty
    #compare last selectionlist with new list and extract the difference
        changedSelection = set(lastselectionList).symmetric_difference(set(w.curselection()))
        lastselectionList = w.curselection()
    else:
    #if empty, assign current selection
        lastselectionList = w.curselection()
        changedSelection = w.curselection()
    #changedSelection should always be a set with only one entry, therefore we can convert it to a lst and extract first entry
    index = int(list(changedSelection)[0])
    value = w.get(index)
    tkinter.messagebox.showinfo("You selected ", value)
listbox = tk.Listbox(frame,selectmode=tk.MULTIPLE)
listbox.bind('<<ListboxSelect>>', onselect)
listbox.pack()