[COLUG] CGI Question

[Aaron Howard]

On Monday 06 August 2007 6:31:08 pm Mark Erbaugh wrote:

> Is there a reverse process to extracting form data where data can be
> applied to a web page?  What I'm looking for is a way to fill in a data
> structure similar to the cgi.FieldStorage() object and then be able to
> combine that with an HTML page and have the value put into the
> appropriate input fields.
>

You will want to do one of two things:

1. use a templating toolkit that works with Python
2. half-ass^Wimplemen your own

Personally, I tend to use the re module to do my own.

What you do is you create a config file (config.py, for instance)
in which you declare a class with basically a bunch of configuration 
parameters such as the names and locations of template files...then, in your 
main python cgi app, you 

from config.py import ConfigClass
cfg = ConfigClass

theform = cfg.theFormTemplateFile

then you

import re

and use regular expression substitution to find fields in your template file 
and replace them with your data.  I use things like 

<input name="foo" value="<!--REPLACEMEWITHFOOVALUE-->" type="text">

Anyway, feel free to e-mail me off-list and we can go a little further with 
this convo and I can give you more code examples.

-Aaron