Overriding builtin getattr method

[Gabriel Genellina]

At Tuesday 3/10/2006 05:24, Raja Raman Sundararajan wrote:

>Hello guys,
>     I have data stored in the database which has special characters
>like <, > etc.
>Case 1: Whenever I wanted to present the output to a browser
>       I need to escape these special characters into the browser
>equivalent like <  > etc.( for example by using the cgi module)
>Case 2: Whenever I wanted to present the output to some client other
>than a browser, I wanted to present the data as it is stored in the
>database.
>
>For doing this I thought of overriding the __builtin__.__getattr__
>method.

Not very reasonable on the source object itself. Escaping <&> is a 
*presentation* requirement and should be managed at that level. For 
example, in a PageTemplate, using tal:content or tal:attribute does 
the right escaping.

>I am wondering if there is any other way of achieving this. I have
>loads of files that get the attribute values of objects stored in the
>database and I do not want to manually change the way of DB access in
>those files. I rather prefer a centralized way to achieve this.

If your data contains a '<', that's OK, it's the real contents and 
should remain that way.
If you have to build an HTML page, escape those characters at *that* stage.
If you have to write a CSV file, perhaps a '<' is irrelevant but a 
',' is problematic.
For some Windows text controls you have to escape '&' characters.
None of these operations should make you to change your data, or the 
way you access your data. You invoke them at the presentation stage, 
depending on the final target.



Gabriel Genellina
Softlab SRL 


	

	
		
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