How to Open File Dialog Box in Python

Sometimes you may need to open file dialog box in your python application. There are many python libraries and modules to help you do that. But tkinter offers one of the easiest ways to work with GUI elements. In this article, we will learn how to open file dialog box in python, using tkinter.

How to Open File Dialog Box in Python

Tkinter is generally pre-installed in all Python distributions so there is no need to any setup. You can simply add the following lines to your code, depending on your Python version, to open file dialog box.

Here is the code for python 3.x.

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import filedialog

root = tk.Tk()
root.withdraw()

file_path = filedialog.askopenfilename()

In the above code, we first import tkinter and use its filedialog function. We define root element and then hide it using withdraw function. Finally, we use askopenfilename() function to open file dialog box.

If you have python 2.x, you need to use the following code.

import Tkinter, tkFileDialog

root = Tkinter.Tk()
root.withdraw()

file_path = tkFileDialog.askopenfilename()

It has similar approach like the previous code block. In this case, we use tkFileDialog object (python 2.x) instead of using filedialog object (Python 3.x).

In this short article, we have learnt how to open file dialog box in Python.

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