text processing: variable interpolation and more

[Roman Suzi]

On Sun, 9 Sep 2001, Greg Weeks wrote:

>Many programs that I've written professionally create text files in various
>languages and formats.  Often, different invocations of the program create
>similar files.  In practice, I have needed both variable interpolation and
>conditional line inclusion in order to make these programs readable.  This
>is easy in Python, and I'd like to share the method below.  (There is
>nothing clever involved, and only 20 lines of code.)

>def render(f, string, globals, locals={}):
>    assert string and string[-1] == "\n", "string must end in newline"
>
>    def repl(mo, globals=globals, locals=locals):
>	if mo.group(1):			# VARIABLE WAS ESCAPED
>	    return  "<%s%s>" % (mo.group(1)[1:], mo.group(2))
>	else:				# THE USUAL CASE
>	    return  str(eval(mo.group(2), globals, locals))


Or you can use DocumentTemplate (from Zope) and write the whole
lot of things with Pythonish %()s-things. (sequencies are nice)

I tried many ways to do templating and found that probably
I just need XSLT. (Because usually information come in structured
bunches).

However, in scripts it is overkill and your method works faster!
The only faster method is to prepare conditional data beforehand:


msg = the_want_us and "glad to see" or "sorry to hear"

print """Dear ....

...
We are %(msg)s that ...
...
""" % vars()

- this doesnt require any special things (even module re). and also, I
found that conditions are rarely so compact to be fit into 20 character at
the end of string. And also it is rarely the case that string is short. So
- anyway some preparation is needed (you need to prepare they_want_us
according to the logic).

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
-- 
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