Searching in a text widget

Richard Suchenwirth 2006-11-28 - Here is example code for searching substrings in a text widget. When an instance is found, it is highlighted with the given tag. At end of the text content, the search wraps around. A global variable reports the position of a found substring.

 proc find {w what tag _status} {
    upvar #0 $_status status
    foreach {from to} [$w tag ranges $tag] {
        $w tag remove $tag $from $to
    }
    set pos [$w search -count n -- $what insert+2c]
    if {$pos eq ""} {
        set status "not found: $what"
    } else {
        set status "found at $pos: $what"
        $w mark set insert $pos
        $w see $pos
        $w tag add $tag $pos $pos+${n}c
    }
 }

# Demo with an entry for the search term, a text, and a label for the status string:

 package require Tk

 pack [entry .e -textvariable Find] -fill x
 bind .e <Return> {find .t $Find hilite state}

 pack [text .t -wrap word]
 .t tag configure hilite -background orange

 pack [label .l -textvariable state] -anchor w