tkinter.messagebox.showinfo doesn't always work

Question

I have just started working with Python's tkinter GUI tool. In my code I create an simple GUI with one button and I want to show the user a messagebox if they click on the button.

Currently, I use the tkinter.messagebox.showinfo method for it. I code on a Windows 7 computer using IDLE. If I run the code from IDLE everything works fine, but if I try to run it standalone in the Python 3 interpreter it doesn't work any more. Instead it logs this error to the console:

AttributeError:'module' object has no attribute 'messagebox'

Do you have any tips for me? My code is:

import tkinter

class simpleapp_tk(tkinter.Tk):
    def __init__(self,parent):
        tkinter.Tk.__init__(self,parent)
        self.parent = parent
        self.temp = False
        self.initialize()

    def initialize(self):
        self.geometry()
        self.geometry("500x250")
        self.bt = tkinter.Button(self,text="Bla",command=self.click)
        self.bt.place(x=5,y=5)
    def click(self):
        tkinter.messagebox.showinfo("blab","bla")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = simpleapp_tk(None)
    app.title('my application')
    app.mainloop()

Answer 1

messagebox, along with some other modules like filedialog, does not automatically get imported when you import tkinter. Import it explicitly, using as and/or from as desired.

>>> import tkinter
>>> tkinter.messagebox.showinfo(message='hi')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'messagebox'
>>> import tkinter.messagebox
>>> tkinter.messagebox.showinfo(message='hi')
'ok'
>>> from tkinter import messagebox
>>> messagebox.showinfo(message='hi')
'ok'