nephish a écrit :
Hey there,
i am trying to write an online application using the cgi module.
what i want to do is have an html form display a drop-down list and
have the values of that list be the lines of text written in a file.
Simplest, Q&D solution :
1/ open the file for reading
2/ print out the beginning of the html tags for the dropdown (hint: in
html, it's <input type="select">)
3/ for each line in the file, print out the html tags and the line
4/ print out the end of the html
5/ close the file
which gives (first try, Q&D, naive implementation, no error handling, etc:
f = open("myfile.txt")
print "<input type='select' name='my-drop-down-list'>"
for line in f:
print "<option>%s</option>" % line.strip()
print "</input>"
f.close()
Now there may be some conditions we want to handle: file doesnt exist or
is not readable, file is empty, a line is empty, etc. A second try could
be like:
try:
f = open("myfile.txt")
except IOError, e:
# TODO : handle error. in the meantime:
print "could not open myfile.txt for reading : %s" % e
sys.exit(1)
else:
print "<input type='select' name='my-drop-down-list'>"
for line in f:
if line.strip():
print "<option>%s</option>" % line.strip()
print "</input>"
f.close()
Well... This does not handle all potential problems, and we begin to
have useless repetitions (here the 'line.strip()' expression). We need
to stop and think a little bit.
This snippet tries to do too many things at once: reading a file line by
line, and printing the html for a select. Since we won't use selects for
huge lists (for obvious usability reasons), we can assume that working
with an in-memory list will be ok. So we could split this in two parts:
one that read the file and returns a cleaned-up, ready to use list, and
one that output the needed html:
# first part
try:
f = open("myfile.txt")
except IOError, e:
# TODO : handle error. in the meantime:
print "could not open myfile.txt for reading : %s" % e
sys.exit(1)
else:
options = filter(None, [line.strip() for line in f])
f.close()
# second part:
if options:
print "<input type='select' name='my-drop-down-list'>"
for line in options:
print "<option>%s</option>" % line
print "</input>"
else:
# Err ? what should we do here ?
print "<i>no selectable option here</i>"
Hmm... Better, but still not ok. We can already guess that both parts
can be useful indepently of each other, in in other contexts. So why not
making this a little be generic ?
def listFrom(openedFile):
return filter(None, [line.strip() for line in openedFile])
def printSelect(name, options):
print "<input type='select' name='%s'>" % name
for line in options:
print "<option>%s</option>" % line
print "</input>"
def printSelectFromFile(name, path):
try:
f = open(path)
except IOError, e:
# TODO : handle error. in the meantime:
print "could not open %s for reading : %s" % (path, e)
sys.exit(1)
else:
options = listFrom(f)
f.close()
if options:
printDropdownList(name, options)
else:
print "<i>no selectable option here</i>"
Well, this could of course be much more improved, but this will depend
on stuffs specific to your application, so I'll leave it up to you...
this would be updated almost every time the site is visited.
Err... Better take care of concurrent access...
i have been sucessful in writing text to a file from an html form. but
i need to access this so it can be selected.
is there a way to do this? i have found limited info on how to really
use the cgi module.
AFAICT, there's nothing related to the cgi module in your problem.
HTH
Bruno
