Tkinter – messageboxes

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The tkinter.messagebox module provides standard dialog boxes to display messages or ask user confirmation in a Tkinter application. These are modal windows, meaning they block other actions in the application until the user closes them.

To use it, you must import the module specifically:

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import messagebox # Imports the messagebox library

Common Message Box Types

The module provides different functions based on the purpose of the alert or the type of user response needed. 

Function	Purpose	Typical Return Value
showinfo()	General information/success alerts.	"ok"
showwarning()	Alerting user to potential issues.	"ok"
showerror()	Reporting a failure or error.	"ok"
askyesno()	Asking a simple Yes/No question.	True / False
askokcancel()	Confirming an action.	True / False

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Utilising showinfo()

Here’s the code:

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import messagebox

def click():
    messagebox.showinfo(title='This is the info messagebox title',
                        message='This is the info messagebox content')

window = Tk()

button = Button(window,command=click,text='click me')
button.pack()

window.mainloop()

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Utilising showwarning()

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import messagebox

def click():
    messagebox.showwarning(title='This is the warning messagebox title',
                        message='This is the warning messagebox content')

window = Tk()

button = Button(window,command=click,text='click me')
button.pack()

window.mainloop()

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Utilising showerror()

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import messagebox

def click():
    messagebox.showerror(title='This is the ERROR messagebox title',
                        message='This is the ERROR messagebox content')

window = Tk()

button = Button(window,command=click,text='click me')
button.pack()

window.mainloop()

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Utilising askokcancel()

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import messagebox

def click():
    if messagebox.askokcancel(title='Ask OK Cancel',message='Do you want to click OK?'):
         print('You clicked OK')
    else:
         print('You chickened out!')

window = Tk()

button = Button(window,command=click,text='click me')
button.pack()

window.mainloop()

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Utilising askyesno() – returns values “True” or “False”

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import messagebox

def click():
    if messagebox.askyesno(title='Ask YES or NO',message='Do you like Python?'):
         print('Me too! Python is amazing!!')
    else:
         print('Thanks for your feedback!')

window = Tk()

button = Button(window,command=click,text='click me')
button.pack()

window.mainloop()

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Utilising askyesnocancel() – returns values “True”, “False” or “None”

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import messagebox

def click():
    answer = messagebox.askyesnocancel(title='Ask YES or NO',message='Do you like Python?')
    if answer == True:
         print('Me too! Coding is cool!!')
    elif answer == False:
         print('You have come to the wrong place!!')
    else:
        print('You\'re dodging the question')

window = Tk()

button = Button(window,command=click,text='click me')
button.pack()

window.mainloop()

Example

Can you work out what this code does? Paste it into your IDE to find out!

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import messagebox

def on_closing():
    # Asks a yes/no question and captures the boolean result
    if messagebox.askyesno("Quit", "Do you really want to exit?"):
        window.destroy()

window = Tk()
window.geometry("200x100")

btn = Button(window, text="Exit Application", command=on_closing)
btn.pack(pady=20)

window.mainloop()

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