Tkinter label height to fit content

[Bart Kastermans]

I build on the suggestion by rantingrick, but took it in a bit
different direction.

I now have working code that performs reasonable.  The reason for
the class lines (as opposed to just a function) is b/c font.measure
appears not that fast.  So I want to remember between different
calls to lines.count where the cutoff was, and then start looking
from there.  This one step of "optimization" was enough to make it
run reasonable on my system.

There are one important thing skipped, Tkinter.Label takes whitespace
into account.  This code does not yet.  Also I just hacked this
together as an example solution to work further from.

import Tkinter as Tk
import tkFont
import random
import sys

def genstr (j):
    rno = random.randint(4,50)
    ret_val = str(j) + ":"
    for i in range (0, rno):
        ret_val += "hello" + str(i)
    return ret_val

def gendata (lh):
    ret_val = []
    for i in range(0,lh):
        ret_val.append (genstr (i))
    return ret_val

data = gendata (100)

root = Tk.Tk()
font = tkFont.Font(family='times', size=13)

class lines:
    def __init__ (self):
        self.lastct = 1   # remember where the cutoff was last work from there

    def count (self, text, cutoff = 400):
        global font
        no_lines = 1
        start_idx = 0
        idx = self.lastct

        while True:
            if idx > len (text):
                idx = len (text)

            # shrink from guessed value
            while font.measure (text[start_idx:idx - 1]) > cutoff:
                if idx <= start_idx:
                    print "error"
                    sys.exit ()
                else:
                    idx -= 1
                    self.lastct = idx - start_idx # adjust since was too big

            # increase from guessed value (note: if first shrunk then done)
            while (idx < len (text)
                   and font.measure (text[start_idx:idx]) < cutoff):
                idx += 1
                self.lastct = idx - start_idx     # adjust since was too small

            # next line has been determined
            print "*" + text[start_idx:idx-1] + "*"
            if idx == len(text) and font.measure (text[start_idx:]) < cutoff:
                return no_lines
            elif idx == len(text):
                return no_lines + 1
            else:
                no_lines += 1
                start_idx = idx - 1
                idx = start_idx + self.lastct

lin = lines()

# for testing speed compute for all data
for i in range(0,len(data)):
    lin.count(data[i], 450)

# show only first 10
for i in range(0,min(len(data),10)):
    l = Tk.Label(root)
    l.pack()
    l['text'] = data[i]
    print i
    no = lin.count (data[i], 450)
    print "computed lines", no
    l['width'] = 50
    l['justify'] = Tk.LEFT
    l['anchor'] = 'w'
    l['wraplength'] = 450
    l['padx']=10
    l['pady'] = 5
    l['height'] = no
    l['font'] = font
    if i % 2 == 0:
        l['background'] = 'grey80'
    else:
        l['background'] = 'grey70'

root.mainloop()