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Autogeneration of web pages

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 18:55:45 -0700

Hello python fans,

I am a bit new to python and already liking this great language. I was trying to autogenerate html pages from cgi scripts. Basically I need to write a Python program to take a file marked up using the following system:

'* filename title' - creates a file using the given filename (with '.html' appended) and gives it the given title, both at the top of the browser (in the <title> section) and as a top level heading (<h1>) on the page.
'**' represents a section heading (<h2>)
'.' represents a paragraph
'-' represents an element in an unordered list (<li> in a <ul>)
'--' represents an element in an unordered list which is in another list
Markups must begin on the first character of a line
Markups may span multiple lines

and convert it into valid XHTML 1.0.

PLEASE EMAIL ME IF YOU HAVE ANY QUERIES. I ALREADY HAVE SOME FUNCTIONS DEFINED LIKE get_file and put_file which will be needed for this program.

Thanks,
pinks.

Re: Autogeneration of web pages

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 07:16:59 -0700

This message was edited by Moderator at 2003-4-2 7:17:20

: Hello python fans,
:
: I am a bit new to python and already liking this great language. I was trying to autogenerate html pages from cgi scripts. Basically I need to write a Python program to take a file marked up using the following system:
:
: '* filename title' - creates a file using the given filename (with '.html' appended) and gives it the given title, both at the top of the browser (in the <title> section) and as a top level heading (<h1>) on the page.
: '**' represents a section heading (<h2>)
: '.' represents a paragraph
: '-' represents an element in an unordered list (<li> in a <ul>)
: '--' represents an element in an unordered list which is in another list
: Markups must begin on the first character of a line
: Markups may span multiple lines
:
: and convert it into valid XHTML 1.0.
:
: PLEASE EMAIL ME IF YOU HAVE ANY QUERIES. I ALREADY HAVE SOME FUNCTIONS DEFINED LIKE get_file and put_file which will be needed for this program.

did you have any specific questions?

infidel

Re: Autogeneration of web pages

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 17:35:18 -0700

I wanted to know how i start the python script; what are the variables needed to be defined.

Re: Autogeneration of web pages

Thu, 03 Apr 2003 07:23:01 -0700

: I wanted to know how i start the python script; what are the variables needed to be defined.

Oh, well the simplest way to write Python cgi scripts is like this:

The first line should be the "shebang":

On a *NIX system:

#!/usr/bin/python

On a Windows system:

#!C:\Python22\python.exe

Of course, the path may be different on your web server.

Then you need to print the header that tells your browser to expect html:

print 'Content-type: text/html\n'

Make sure you have the newline at the end!

After that, anything you print will be parsed by the browser as html. For example:

#!/usr/bin/python
print 'Content-type: text/html\n'
print """
<html>
    <head>
        <title>My first cgi script!</title>
    <head>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
    </body>
</html>
"""

Then you just drop that script in the cgi-bin on your server and call it with a regular URL in a browser.

Debugging cgi is rather frustrating, but there is a way in python to make it much easier to find code errors. Just after the shebang line (which must be the first line of the file) put this:

import cgitb; cgitb.enable()

This imports the cgi traceback module. If any exceptions are raised by your script, you will get a pretty html display of the code and a description of the error and the line that caused it rather than the unhelpful "500: Internal Server Error".

infidel