Question

I have a main PyQt window, from which I need to get a string of User Input when they hit a certain button.

Here is my code for the User Input window:

 class InputDialog(QtGui.QDialog):
   '''
   this is for when you need to get some user input text
   '''
   def __init__(self, parent=None, title='user input', label='comment', text=''):

       QtGui.QWidget.__init__(self, parent)

       #--Layout Stuff---------------------------#
       mainLayout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout()

       layout = QtGui.QHBoxLayout()
       self.label = QtGui.QLabel()
       self.label.setText(label)
       layout.addWidget(self.label)

       self.text = QtGui.QLineEdit(text)
       layout.addWidget(self.text)

       mainLayout.addLayout(layout)

       #--The Button------------------------------#
       layout = QtGui.QHBoxLayout()
       button = QtGui.QPushButton("okay") #string or icon
       self.connect(button, QtCore.SIGNAL("clicked()"), self.close)
       layout.addWidget(button)

       mainLayout.addLayout(layout)
       self.setLayout(mainLayout)

       self.resize(400, 60)
       self.setWindowTitle(title)

From the main window, I am saying:

inputter = InputDialog(mainWindowUI, title="comments", label="comments", text="")
inputter.show()
comment = inputter.text.text()
print comment

This prints an empty string, even if the user types a comment and hits “OK”. Obviously because the main window script does not wait on the InputDialog to close. So, how do I get it to wait, so that I may retrieve the user input?

Answer 1

Use

inputter.exec_()

instead of

inputter.show()

From: http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/static/Docs/PyQt4/html/qdialog.html#exec

This method is also a Qt slot with the C++ signature int exec().

Shows the dialog as a modal dialog, blocking until the user closes it.
The function returns a DialogCode result.

If the dialog is application modal, users cannot interact with any
other window in the same application until they close the dialog. If
the dialog is window modal, only interaction with the parent window is
blocked while the dialog is open. By default, the dialog is
application modal.

See also open(), show(), result(), and setWindowModality().