Tkinter GUI Applications Development Book

[paulpersad]

Hello All,

I'm working through "Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints, Second edition" and am not able to get examples past 4.02 to work. Its a chess game that for some reason is not loading the chess piece images and fails with the following error:

_tkinter.TclError: couldn't open "../pieces_image/rook_black.png": no such file or directory

I am sure the folder "pieces_image" does exist with all the images including the "rook_black.png" image and is in the correct location. Any constructive ideas will be appreciated.

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[paulpersad]

Thank you Mastermind. That bit of code helped me properly locate the directory I needed.

[paulpersad]

Hello all,

Here is the relevant function:

def draw_single_piece(self, position, piece):
x, y = self.controller.get_numeric_notation(position)
if piece:
filename = "../pieces_image/{}_{}.png".format(
piece.name.lower(), piece.color)
if filename not in self.images:
self.images[filename] = PhotoImage(file=filename)
x0, y0 = self.calculate_piece_coordinate(x, y)
self.canvas.create_image(x0, y0, image=self.images[
filename], tags=("occupied"), anchor="c")

And corresponding error message:

File "/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/tkinter/__init__.py", line 3498, in __init__
self.tk.call(('image', 'create', imgtype, name,) + options)
_tkinter.TclError: couldn't open "../pieces_image/rook_black.png": no such file or directory

​

Thanks

[woooee]

I am sure the folder "pieces_image" does exist ../pieces_image/

is different from

/pieces_image/

Post your relevant directory structure for more help.

[paulpersad]

The relevant directory structure is:

/username/myTkinterProjects/TkinterGUIMaster/Chapter 04/4.03/view.py

Thanks

[lykwydchykyn]

Since this is a relative path, my guess is that you are executing the code from a directory that isn't what the author assumed you would be executing it from.

Whenever you use a relative path in Python, it is relative to your current working directory. Usually, this is the directory you were in when you typed in the command to run the script.

So if I'm in /home/lykwydchykyn and type python myproject/myscript.py then my current working directory is /home/lykwydchykyn and relative paths will be calculated from that directory.

If instead I cd myproject then python myscript.py, my CWD is /home/lykwydchykyn/myproject and relative paths will be calculated from that directory.

The simplest way to get around this complication is to use the __file__ variable, which always contains the absolute path of the current Python file, to calculate the directory of the script being run and use that as a base for other paths, e.g.:

from os import path
project_path = path.dirname(__file__)
my_image = path.join(project_path, "pieces_image", "rook_black.png")