Page Generators & CGI

We have seen examples in ThinkPython of python programs that manipulate text.

It is now a small step to changing the output of our program from "plain text" to use some simple markup of HTML.

The next step is CGI!

Python CGI checklist

Reading for Next Week

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

#!/usr/bin/python

import cgi

fs = cgi.FieldStorage()
text = fs.getvalue("text", "")

print "Content-type: text/html; charset=utf8"
print

print """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>form building blocks</title>
</head>

<body>
<form action="" method="get">
"""


words = text.split()
newtext = " ".join(words[::-1])

print "<h1>" + newtext + "</h1>"

print """
<textarea name="text">
""" + text.strip() + """
</textarea>
"""

print """
<input type="submit" name="submitbutton" value="go!" />


<h2>Some starting options</h2>
<a href="?text=tomato" >tomato</a>
<a href="?text=once+upon+a+time" >once upon a time</a>



</form>
</body>
</html>

"""