embedding python in HTML

Fri Feb 17 10:00:25 EST 2006

John Salerno wrote:
> Kirk McDonald wrote:
> 
>> A more common (and bare-metal) approach is CGI. In CGI, a request for a 
>> page runs a script, the output of which is the HTML page. I think this 
>> only requires that the server has Python installed, which you have said 
>> is the case. Python has signifigant standard library support for writing 
>> CGI.
> 
> Thanks, that makes much more sense to me now. But does this mean I can 
> still write HTML normally? What would an example be of having HTML 
> within a Python script? I have a hard time picturing this, because I 
> imagine that most of my pages will be almost all HTML, with just a bit 
> of Python here and there, perhaps to insert headers and footers. Is all 
> the HTML just wrapped in a big print statement, or something like that?

When writing for CGI, it will be.

It will basically look like this:

#!/bin/env python

# these are custom headers, Content-type is mandatory
print "Content-Type: text/html"
# an empty line separates headers from content
print

print "<html>..."
# do stuff here
print "...</html>"

Georg