Question

My question is somewhat related to Get a layout's widgets in PyQT but it’s not a duplicate. Instead of looking for a high level strategic view of how to do it, I’m trying to understand what the most idiomatic and straightforward way to do it would be. Since PyQt is a pretty exact binding of the Qt C++ API, it presents a C-ish way to get at widgets in a layout. Here is the sort of idiom I have been using:

for i in range(layout.count()):
  item = layout.itemAt(i)
  if type(item) == QtGui.QLayoutItem:
    doSomeStuff(item.layout())
  if type(item) == QtGui.QWidgetItem:
doSomething(item.widget())

I’m not the most experienced Python guy, but this seems somewhat unpythonic. My intuition is telling me that in an ideal world, the Python code should look something more like:

for w in layout.widgets():
  doSomething(w)

Am I wrong? Am I missing a superior idiom? Is this the best possible way to iterate over widgets in PyQt? I tend to think in C++, so I sometimes miss out on “obvious” Python language features that make things better. Part of what I’m doing is recursively descending into widgets with layouts with widgets with layouts (etc…) to automatically wire up connections to UI’s made in Designer at run time. Add in QTabWidgets, and handling of the dynamic properties set in designer, and my code basically works, but it just feels horribly clunky.

Answer 1

You could put the widgets into a generator like so:

items = (layout.itemAt(i) for i in range(layout.count())) 
for w in items:
   doSomething(w)

If you end up using that a lot, you could sock that code into a generator function:

def layout_widgets(layout):
   return (layout.itemAt(i) for i in range(layout.count()))


for w in layout_widgets(layout):
   doSomething(w)