How to open text files using a listbox in Tkinter

Question

I am using Python 3.2 for Windows with Tkinter 8.5. Does anyone knows if it is possible to open text file by selecting an item on a listbox and display the text file contents on a text widget? Here is my code:

def starters_menu():
        self.listBox.delete(0, END)
        starters_menu = open("starters_menu.txt")
        for line in starters_menu:
            line = line.rstrip()
            self.listBox.insert(END, line)
        self.listBox.bind("<ButtonRelease-1>", recipe_title, add="+")
        self.listBox.bind("<ButtonRelease-1>", recipe_ingredients, add="+")
    recipe_menu.add_command(label="Starters, Snacks and Savouries", command=starters_menu)

I need help to write the definition for "recipe_ingredients" so that when the item in the list is selected, a text file linked to the item is opened and its contents displayed in text widget. I need to know how how to link a file to the listbox item and how to call it using the handler shown in the code above.

Answer 1

Text Files

You can open a text file and dump it's contents into a string like so:

textFile = open(filename, 'r')
#open() returns a file object
#'r' opens the file for reading. 'w' would be writing
textString = textFile.read()
#This takes the file object opened with the open() and turns it into a string which
#you can now use textString in a text widget.

More info on text files and Python

Linking listbox with text files

To link listbox items with a text files, I suppose you could have all the things you are putting in the listbox in a dictionary, more info here. Unlike arrays or lists, which are indexed by a range of numbers, dictionaries are indexed by keys, which can be any immutable type; strings and numbers can always be keys. So for instance you could have a filename as the key and whatever you want in the listbox as the value.

I hope I helped a bit.