tkinter: how to write a for loop to destroy a list of labels?

Question

I am trying to remove these elements from the grid. I was able to delete all of them by writing out one by one. I then wrote a for loop to make it expandable, then I run into this error message.

"employee.destroy()
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'destroy'"

This is part of a bigger program, but as much as I can reduce to the core problem, here is my code:

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk

labelemployee={}

class Application(ttk.Frame): #inherent from frame.

    def __init__(self, parent):
        tk.Frame.__init__(self, parent, bg="LightBlue4")
        self.parent = parent
        self.Employees = ["A", "B", "C", "D"]
        self.pack(fill=tk.BOTH, expand=1)
        self.GUI()

    def GUI(self): #the function that runs all the GUI functions.
        self.buttons()
        self.create_grid()
        self.add_left_names()

    def remove(self):
        #labelemployee["A"].destroy()
        #labelemployee["B"].destroy()
        #labelemployee["C"].destroy()
        #labelemployee["D"].destroy()
        for employee in labelemployee:
            employee.destroy()

    def create_grid(self):
        for i in range (7):
             for j in range(7):
                self.label = tk.Label(self, relief="ridge", width=12, 
                       height=3)
                self.label.grid(row=i, column=j, sticky='nsew')

    def buttons(self):
        self.button=tk.Button(self, text="Clear", bg="salmon", command 
             = self.remove)
        self.button.grid(row=7, column=6, sticky='e')

    def add_left_names(self):
       #--------add in name labels on the side--------------        
        i=2
        for employee in self.Employees:
            self.label=tk.Label(self, text=employee ,  fg="red", 
               bg="snow")
            self.label.grid(row=i,column=0)
            labelemployee[employee]=self.label
            i +=1

def main():
    root = tk.Tk()
    root.title("class basic window")
    root.geometry("1000x500")
    root.config(background="LightBlue4")
    app = Application(root)
    root.mainloop()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Please help me. I think the problem is my for loop is stored a list, and I have a dictionary. So, then I guess i don't know how to destroy labels in a dictionary.

Answer 1

You have already figured out the issue in those comments !

You already know that labelemployee is a dictionary, so iterating over it will give you, by default, the keys of the dictionary. So employee will be strings like A, B... and so on. And destroying a string object will obviously give you an error. You need to destroy the corresponding tkinter widget. So for that, you should replace employee.destroy() with labelemployee[employee].destroy() in the for loop.