Easy "here documents" ??

[Jerry Sievers]

jimhill at swcp.com (Jim Hill) writes:

> I've done some Googling around on this and it seems like creating a here
> document is a bit tricky with Python.  Trivial via triple-quoted strings
> if there's no need for variable interpolation but requiring a long, long
> formatted arglist via (%s,%s,%s,ad infinitum) if there is.  So my
> question is:
> 
> Is there a way to produce a very long multiline string of output with
> variables' values inserted without having to resort to this wacky
> 
> """v = %s"""%(variable)
> business?

Hmmmmmm, by using the %(varname)[dsf...] with vars(), locals(),
globals(), someDict, et al, a little messy but not terribly difficult.

It gets uglier though if you want to do this from inside a function
and have variables from more than one scope interpolated.  For that
you need something that can treat a series of dicts as one.If there's
built in functionality in Python for this, I haven't discovered it
yet.

To wit;

# feed this thing with one or more dicts, in order of decreasing
#search priority.
class multiDict:
    def __init__(self, *dicts):
        self.dicts = dicts
    def __getitem__(self, key):
        for dict in self.dicts:
            if dict.has_key(key):
                return dict[key]
        raise(KeyError)

globalvar = 100

def foo():
    localvar = 200

    print """
%(globalvar)d
%(localvar)d
""" % multiDict(globals(), locals())

foo()

------------------

Now all else that we need to make this pretty would be macros, a la
cpp m4 or similar

define(`VARS', `multiDict(locals(), globals())')

print "..." % VARS

You get the idea.


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