Explain Tkinter text search method

Question

I don't quite understand how text.search method works. For example there is a sentence: Today a red car appeared in the park. I need to find a red car sequence and highlight it. It is found but here is how my highlighting looks like:

I am using self.text.search(word, start, stopindex=END) on the sentence. And it looks like search method works exactly like python's regexp search. Adding exact=True didn't change anything since it is default behavior which is why I don't understand what exact=True actually means. How to make a red car highlighted correctly?

Answer 1

The search method returns the index of the first match at or after the starting index, and optionally the number of characters that matched. You are responsible for highlighting what it found by using this information.

For example, consider this search:

countVar = tk.StringVar()
pos = text.search("a red car", "1.0", stopindex="end", count=countVar)

If a match is found, pos will contain the index of the first character of the match and countVar will contain the number of characters that matched. You can use this information to highlight the match by using an index of the form "index + N chars" or the shorthand "index + Nc". For example, if pos was 2.6 and count was 9, the index of the last character of the match would be 2.6+9c

With that, and assuming you've already configured a tag named "search" (eg: text.tag_configure("search", background="green")), you can add this tag to the start and end of the match like this:

text.tag_add("search", pos, "%s + %sc" (pos, countVar.get()))

To highlight all matches, just put the search command in a loop, and adjust the starting position to be one character past the end of the previous match.

Answer 2

It may be a problem of the indexes.

In a program of mine, i have to search the start index and calculate the end index

my method for example, it works fine:

def highlight(self):
    start = 1.0
    pos = self.area_example.search(self.item.name, start, stopindex=END)
    while pos:
        length = len(self.item.name)
        row, col = pos.split('.')
        end = int(col) + length
        end = row + '.' + str(end)
        self.area_example.tag_add('highlight', pos, end)
        start = end
        pos = self.area_example.search(self.item.name, start, stopindex=END)
    self.area_example.tag_config('highlight', background='white', foreground='red')