Suppose you want the user to enter some data for a Python program to work on. For this, Python provides the input statement, which can print out a prompting string and wait for keyboard input. 

name = input("What is your name? ")
print("Hi "+name +" boy!")

This little program asks for your name and waits for you to type a string and press Enter. The input statement accepts keyboard input and returns a string. So, the resulting console results might look like this:

What is your name? Jim
Hi Jim boy!

Heinlein fans may recognize the reference.

You can paste that 2-line program into any development environment, such as Thonny, PyCharm or even Jupyter Notebook and see it work right away.

Adding two numbers

Of course, you can enter numbers as well, but you must be sure to convert the resulting strings into an int or a float. Here we use the more general float.

x = float(input("Enter x: "))
y = float(input("Enter y: "))
print("The sum is: ", x+y)

The resulting output is:

Enter x: 23.45|
Enter y: 41.46
The sum is:  64.91

Of course, this naïve program expects only legal input. If you enter, say, “qq” instead of 22, you will get a Python error:

File "C:\Users\James\PycharmProjects\input\inputdemo.py", line 7, in <module>    
y = float(input("Enter y: "))
ValueError: could not convert string to float: 'qq'

There are ways to check for this, of course, such as catching Exceptions, and we will explain those in the following example.

However, you will only find the input statement in rudimentary examples. Most programs that need user input get it from a windowing interface. We’ll show these same examples next using the tkinter GUI library.

Making a windowing example program

You can do much the same thing by using the Entry field in the tkinter GUI (graphical user interface). Here we repeat those examples in simple tkinter windows.  To use tkinter, you have to import that library into your program:

from tkinter import *
import tkinter as tk

You also create an abbreviation for tkinter, naming it just tk.

Then, most of the setup code creates the visual widgets and their arrangement. In the following example, we use an Entry field, a Button and two Labels. You start by getting the window system pointer tk.Tk() and use it to attach the widgets to. After you create this objects, you run the mainloop() function which displays the window and receives mouse and keyboard input. The window keeps running until you close it by clicking on the “X” in the upper right corner or selects some widget that causes the window to close.

Our first example above was one where you enter your name and it says Hello back, again giving homage to Heinlein in the process. The tkinter program does the same thing

The code for this program creates the two labels, the Entry field and the OK button:

def build(self):
    root = tk.Tk()
    # top label
    Label(root,
         text="""What is your name?""",
         justify=LEFT, fg='blue', pady=10, padx=20).pack()

    # create entry field
    self.nmEntry = Entry(root)
    self.nmEntry.pack()   # and put it into the window

    # OK button calls getName when clicked
    self.okButton = Button(root, text="OK",
                            command=self.getName )
    self.okButton.pack()

    # This is the label whose text changes
    self.cLabel = Label(root, text='name', fg='blue')
    self.cLabel.pack()
    mainloop()      #run loop until window closes

When you click on the OK button, it calls the getName method, which fetches the text from the entry field and inserts it into the bottom label text.

# gets the entry field text
# places it on the cLabel text field
def getName(self):
   newName = self.nmEntry.get()
   self.cLabel.configure(text="Hi "+newName+" boy!")

Adding two numbers

And our second example rewritten from above reads two Entry fields, converts them to floats and puts the sum in the lower label.

 The code for this window is much the same, except that we fetch and add two numbers. Here is the function the OK button calls.

xval= float(self.xEntry.get())
yval = float(self.yEntry.get())
self.cLabel.configure(text="Sum = "+str(xval+yval))

Catching the error

However, if you enter some illegal non-numeric value, you can catch the exception and issue a error message:

try:
    xval= float(self.xEntry.get())
    yval = float(self.yEntry.get())
    self.cLabel.configure(text="Sum = "+str(xval+yval))
except:
    messagebox.showerror("Conversion error",
                              "Not numbers")

If you enter non-numeric strings, the program displays this message box:

And that’s all there is to creating a program with a simple graphical user interface.