Book Image

Tcl/Tk 8.5 Programming Cookbook

Book Image

Tcl/Tk 8.5 Programming Cookbook

Overview of this book

With Tcl/Tk, you can create full-featured cross-platform applications in a simple and easy-to-understand way without any expensive development package; the only tools required are a simple text editor and your imagination. This practical cookbook will help you to efficiently interact with editors, debuggers, and shell type interactive programs using Tcl/Tk 8. This cookbook will comprehensively guide you through practical implementation of Tcl/Tk 8.5 commands and tools. This book will take you through all the steps needed to become a productive programmer in Tcl/Tk 8. Right from guiding you through the basics to creating a stand-alone application, it provides complete explanation of all the steps along with handy tips and tricks. The book begins with an introduction to the Tcl shell, syntax, variables, and programming best practices in the language. It then explores procedures and the flow of events with control constructs followed by advanced error trapping and recovery. From Chapter 4, a detailed study of string expressions and handling enables you to handle various string functions and use lists to expand the string functionality. The book then discusses in-depth the Tcl Dictionary and how to utilize it to store and retrieve data. File operations and Tk GUI handling are covered extensively along with a developing a real-world address book application to practice the concepts learned.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Tcl/Tk 8.5 Programming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Assigning values


In this section we will be creating a nested dictionary containing multiple entries for each record. By using the Tcl dict with command we will then assign variables in the body of our script that are based on the keys stored within our dictionary. The dict with command allows us to accomplish this by assigning entries within our dictionary to variables and then executing a script. The syntax is as follows:

dict with name keys… script

How to do it…

In the following example, we will create a nested dictionary to hold a collection of key/value pairs and then using the dict for and with commands we will execute a script to output the values to the screen. Return values from the commands are provided for clarity. Enter the following command:

% set person1 [dict create firstname John lastname Smith title Manager]
firstname John lastname Smith title Manager
% set person2 [dict create firstname Mary lastname Jones title Developer]
firstname Mary lastname Jones title Developer}...