Is there a difference between QFileDialog strings in PyQt4 and PyQt5?

I have a block of code that opens a QFileDialog using Python3 and PyQt5:

from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QWidget, QPushButton, QFileDialog
import sys


class MCVE(QWidget):

    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.initialize()

    def initialize(self):
        self.setWindowTitle('MCVE')
        self.setGeometry(50, 50, 400, 200)
        btn = QPushButton('Example', self)
        btn.clicked.connect(self.clicked)

        self.show()

    def clicked(self):
        filename = QFileDialog.getOpenFileName(
            self, "Open Template", "c:\",
            "Templates (*.xml);;All Files (*.*)")

        print(filename)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)
    ex = MCVE()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())

In Python 2 using PyQt4 the print(filename) statement, after pressing the cancel button, outputs as an empty string. When I run the same code in Python 3 using PyQt5 I get:

(”, ”)

NOTE: The quotes are Single Quotes

Can someone explain what is going on? I couldn’t find anything under the documentation between PyQt4 and PyQt5. I know that strings changed between Python 2 and Python 3, but I’m not sure those changes would cause an issue like this. Thanks!

Answers:

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Method 1

The getOpenFileName function in PyQt4 returns a string that is the name of the selected file, and if none is selected then it returns an empty string.

filename = QFileDialog.getOpenFileName(self, "Open Template", "c:\", "Templates (*.xml);;All Files (*.*)")

However in PyQt5 this returns a tuple of 2 elements where the first one is a string that has the same behavior as in PyQt4, and the second element is the filter used.

filename, filters = QFileDialog.getOpenFileName(self, "Open Template", "c:\", "Templates (*.xml);;All Files (*.*)")

Note: The majority of documentation of PyQt5 is in Qt5, since in general the names of the methods, the inputs and the result are similar.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0