Is there an efficient way to tell if text is selected in a Tkinter Text widget?

Question

On this page describing the Tkinter text widget, it's stated that 'The selection is a special tag named SEL (or “sel”) that corresponds to the current selection. You can use the constants SEL_FIRST and SEL_LAST to refer to the selection. If there’s no selection, Tkinter raises a TclError exception.'

My question: is there a more efficient way to tell if there is a selection in a Text widget besides fooling with exceptions, like the below code?

seltext = None
try:
   seltext = txt.get(SEL_FIRST, SEL_LAST)
except TclError:
   pass

if seltext:
   # do something with text

Answer 1

You can ask the widget for the range of text that the "sel" tag encompases. If there is no selection the range will be of zero length:

if txt.tag_ranges("sel"):
    print "there is a selection"
else:
    print "there is no selection"