Recently I had to customize a bit the gtk.EntryCompletion widget to match against a list of word. The particularity of the needed customization is to have this widget display its popup everytime the user types in a new word, the words are separated by space.

So I dug around because I thought that the only way was to write a custom widget, but I immediately found a problem: there’s no documentation on writing custom widgets with PyGTK except for this: widget.py (in the pygtk cvs repository). Looking here and there I found myself in the GTK+ cvs repository reading this and this… but there was nothing there for me

Oh good old C-days! The solution (with the hint of Juhaz@#pygtk on irc.gimp.net) was a lot easier than I thought: [code lang="python"]

gtkentrymulticompletion.py

author: Lawrence Oluyede

import pygtk pygtk.require(”2.0?) import gobject import gtk from gtk import gdk

class EntryMultiCompletion(gtk.Entry): def init(self): gtk.Entry.init(self) self.completion = gtk.EntryCompletion() # customize the matching function to match multiple space # separated words self.completion.set_match_func(self.match_func, None) # handle the match-selected signal, raised when a completion # is selected from the popup self.completion.connect(”match-selected”, self.on_completion_match) self.set_completion(self.completion)

def match_func(self, completion, key_string, iter, data):
    model = self.completion.get_model()
    # get the completion strings
    modelstr = model[iter][0]
    # check if the user has typed in a space char,
    # get the last word and check if it matches something
    if ” ” in key_string:
        last_word = key_string.split()[-1]
        return modelstr.startswith(last_word)
    # we have only one word typed
    return modelstr.startswith(key_string)

def on_completion_match(self, completion, model, iter):
    current_text = self.get_text()
    # if more than a word has been typed, we throw away the
    # last one because we want to replace it with the matching word
    # note: the user may have typed only a part of the entire word
    #       and so this step is necessary
    if ” ” in current_text:
        current_text = ” “.join(current_text.split()[:-1])
    # add the matching word
    current_text = “%s %s” % (current_text, model[iter][0])

    # set back the whole text
    self.set_text(current_text)
    # move the cursor at the end
    self.set_position(-1)

    # stop the event propagation
    return True

if name == “main”: # register the class as a Gtk widget gobject.type_register(EntryMultiCompletion)

win = gtk.Window()
win.connect(’delete-event’, gtk.main_quit)

entrycompl = EntryMultiCompletion()
liststore = gtk.ListStore(gobject.TYPE_STRING)
entrycompl.completion.set_model(liststore)
entrycompl.completion.set_text_column(0)
for word in [’abc’, ‘def’, ‘ghi’, ‘jkl’, ‘mno’,
             ‘pqr’, ’stu’, ‘vwx’, ‘yz’]:
    liststore.append([word])

win.add(entrycompl)
win.show_all()

gtk.main()

[/code]

written on Python 2.4.1, PyGTK 2.6.1, GTK+ 2.6.4

It’s a bit hacky but it works!

update: fixed a couple of bugs and avoid the display of popup if the char is a space. Also, the thing it’s in the PyGTK FAQ, look: How do I insert a list of words (space separated) in a GtkEntry with the help of GtkEntryCompletion?