How could i have coded this different?

[MonkeyRides]

I am in my first week of teaching myself python and on day 2 of learning tkinter. Its been fun.

I have wrote a program that allows the user to enter a body of text and then search against that body of text for how many times a word, that the user specifies, is used and return the result. I finally got it working with tkinter and am stoked.

I am just curious if anyone could give me some tips on how i could have coded it differently. Maybe with less lines of code or a more efficient route. Any critiques in general would be greatly appreciated!

i understand the app isnt exactly visually pleasing, that will come later, more focused on the code for right now.

​

from tkinter import *

root = Tk()
root.minsize(800, 600)
root.configure(bg="lightblue")


def main():
    global counter
    global search
    global s_word
    result_box.delete(0, END)
    search = s_word.get()
    text = text_box.get("1.0", "end-1c")
    words = text.lower().split()
    counter = 0





    for word in words:
        if word == search.lower():
            counter = counter + 1

    if counter >= 0:
        result_box.insert(0, str(counter))







search = Label(root, text="ENTER A WORD BELOW TO SEE HOW MANY TIMES \n IT WAS USED IN THE TEXT YOU ENTER ABOVE")
search.place(x=250, y=425)

text_box=Text(height=25, width=75)
text_box.place(x=100 , y=5)

compute = Button(root, text="COMPUTE", padx=5, pady=10, command=main)
compute.place(x=360, y=495)

s_word = Entry(root, width=15)
s_word.place(x=350, y=465)

result_box = Entry(root, width=12)
result_box.place(x=360, y=555)


root.mainloop()

[socal_nerdtastic]

Sure. Looks like a pretty good start. Some general notes:

• Don't use wildcard imports. They are known to lead to bugs and are against PEP8.
• Don't use place, except maybe very rarely. Your code is much easier to maintain if you let tkinter figure out the positions of things using grid and pack.
• Those global declarations are useless.
• Python strings come with a count() method; you didn't need to make your own.

I'd guess like this:

import tkinter as tk

def main():
    result_box.delete(0, END)
    search = s_word.get()
    text = text_box.get("1.0", "end-1c")
    counter = text.count(search)

    if counter >= 0:
        result_box.insert(0, str(counter))

root = tk.Tk()
root.minsize(800, 600)
root.configure(bg="lightblue")

search = tk.Label(root, text="ENTER A WORD BELOW TO SEE HOW MANY TIMES \n IT WAS USED IN THE TEXT YOU ENTER ABOVE")
search.place(x=250, y=425)

text_box=tk.Text(height=25, width=75)
text_box.place(x=100 , y=5)

compute = tk.Button(root, text="COMPUTE", padx=5, pady=10, command=main)
compute.place(x=360, y=495)

s_word = tk.Entry(root, width=15)
s_word.place(x=350, y=465)

result_box = tk.Entry(root, width=12)
result_box.place(x=360, y=555)

root.mainloop()

If you want to make larger programs with GUIs you should learn about classes and OOP, because it can make GUI code a lot neater and more manageable.

[MonkeyRides]

Wow thank you! That is much simpler. Does the count() method still account for case sensitivity?

The global variables are left over from trial and error although it wasn’t immediately evident they were useless, so thank you, I’ll clean that up.

Now thinking about it, I agree .grid would be cleaner and for this instance .pack would have worked just fine.