A Scientific Notation Double Spin Box for PyQt/PySide

Posted on July 28, 2014

In this post I am going to describe how I built a modified QDoubleSpinBox that can handle scientific notation. If you just want the code, check out this gist.

UPDATE: Here is a fork that works on Python 2 and PyQt. Thanks Thomas!


The GUI I a creating at work requires a lot of individual float inputs. Before today, I was using a modified QLineEdit subclass that called the Python float() builtin to convert the text to a value. The problem with this approach is it is hard to come up with sensible behavior when the text is not a valid float. I needed behavior like that of a QDoubleSpinBox, but I needed to work with numbers in scientific notation. By default, a QDoubleSpinBox cannot handle scientific notation, so I had to roll my own ScientificDoubleSpinBox.

I’ll explain the process in the next sections:

  1. Create a QValidator to check if floats are valid.
  2. Subclass QDoubleSpinBox to plug in this validator.

Detecting valid floats

The python float() function can handle scientific notation in a few various forms:

>>> float("1.2e4")
>>> float("1.2e+04")
>>> float("1.2e-4")

To validate a float, we could simply wrap the float() function in a try/except block. However, we will need to use various parts of the float string later on, so let’s create a regular expression and a function to validate a float string:

# Regular expression to find floats. Match groups are the whole string, the
# whole coefficient, the decimal part of the coefficient, and the exponent
# part.
_float_re = re.compile(r'(([+-]?\d+(\.\d*)?|\.\d+)([eE][+-]?\d+)?)')

def valid_float_string(string):
    match = _float_re.search(string)
    return match.groups()[0] == string if match else False

Here are some examples of using the regular expression and the function:

>>> _float_re.search("-10.23e-5").groups()
('-10.23e-5', '-10.23', '.23', 'e-5')
>>> valid_float_string("1.3e4")
>>> misc.valid_float_string("abcdefg")

Scientific notation QValidator

A QValidator is installed on into widgets such as QLineEdit to detect in real time if the value being entered is valid. For example, our validator should allow a user to enter any value that can be interpreted as a float. While editing, a user should not be able to enter a value that cannot possibly be in a scientific notation string (every character in _float_re).

class FloatValidator(QtGui.QValidator):

    def validate(self, string, position):
        if valid_float_string(string):
            return self.State.Acceptable
        if string == "" or string[position-1] in 'e.-+':
            return self.State.Intermediate
        return self.State.Invalid

    def fixup(self, text):
        match = _float_re.search(text)
        return match.groups()[0] if match else ""

The validate method is called by the editing widget to determine if the entered value is alright, intermediate (not alright, but not quite invalid), or invalid. The fixup method attempts to fix the string. Our fixup method searches for a valid float string inside the entire text, and returns that.

We could use this validator on a line edit with QLineEdit.setValidator(validator), but we want some of the features of a QDoubleSpinBox, like increment/decrement buttons, and automatic float conversion. We don’t actually use the validator as a QValidator, but is nice to have in case you want to use it for something similar.

QDoubleSpinBox subclass

Now, we just combine the plumbing we just built into a subclass of QDoubleSpinBox:

class ScientificDoubleSpinBox(QtGui.QDoubleSpinBox):

        self.validator = FloatValidator()

    def validate(self, text, position):
        return self.validator.validate(text, position)

    def fixup(self, text):
        return self.validator.fixup(text)

    def valueFromText(self, text):
        return float(text)

    def textFromValue(self, value):
        return format_float(value)

    def stepBy(self, steps):
        text = self.cleanText()
        groups = _float_re.search(text).groups()
        decimal = float(groups[1])
        decimal += steps
        new_string = "{:g}".format(decimal) + (groups[3] if groups[3] else "")

def format_float(value):
    """Modified form of the 'g' format specifier."""
    string = "{:g}".format(value).replace("e+", "e")
    string = re.sub("e(-?)0*(\d+)", r"e\1\2", string)
    return string

All of the methods except for stepBy are self explanatory. The stepBy method is used when the step buttons are pressed. In our implementation, we use our regular expression groups to extract the coefficient of the scientific notation string, and increment it. The format_float function is just a nicer version of "{:g}".format(value).


We created a QDoubleSpinBox subclass that can handle scientific notation. We also created a QValidator that, while not used in the spin box, is useful to validate float strings. Check out this gist for all of the code.

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