[Tutor] Why not to use include?

Sun Jun 8 17:13:21 CEST 2008

2008/6/8 Kent Johnson <kent37 at tds.net>:
> On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 6:46 AM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am moving a website from php to python gradually. The first step is
>> replacing the page headers and footers.
>
> I'm not sure how you plan to do this. PHP programs are embedded into
> web pages. Python web programs output the contents of the web page.
> This is pretty different.

Very little of the pages are PHP, most is HTML. I understand that
Python can be used as a web scripting language, so I assume that
Python can be run in Apache from a page with an .html extension. Is
this not the case, with an .httaccess directive?

>> Currently, each page begins
>> with <?php include "header.php"; ?> which contains the <head> porton
>> of the html and the html code to present the website name and logo.
>> Each page ends with <?php include"footer.php"; ?> which includes a
>> footer note and the closing body and html tags. Of course this is a
>> generalization, but the point is that I need to do something similar
>> in Python. Python discourages the use of includes
>
> Python doesn't have anything that functions like an include to
> incorporate a literal block of text from an external file. I guess you
> could call that discouragement....

Could I do something similar with a function? Something like
printHeader() and I would define that function in a class?

>> , and I would like to
>> know why so that I can either rethink my page strategy, or decide to
>> go against the 'recommended practices'.
>
> You should probably find a Python template package that uses syntax
> similar to PHP. There is a comparison of three modern template
> packages here:
> http://lucumr.pocoo.org/cogitations/2008/01/01/python-template-engine-comparison/
>
> A more complete list is here:
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/Templating?highlight=%28genshi%29

Thanks, I will go through those.

> If your website is complex you might also want to consider a full web
> framework such as Django or TurboGears.

Since half the reason for the website to exist is for me to learn to
program (just for fun) then I would rather not use an existing
framework. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
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A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?