I enjoyed Paul Barry's September article in Linux Journal entitled, "Web Reporting with MySQL, CSS and Perl". It provides a simple, elegant way to use HTML to display database content without any sql markup in the cgi script. The cgi script simply calls the Mysql command line with the HTML option (-H) and the SQL script file directed to that command. This provides complete separation of the markup from the sql code. The plain vanila HTML output can be spruced up with CSS to provide more color and size control of the HTML.
Could this script be easily converted to Python? How would you execute the Msql command line and direct the output to a variable for display in the cgi script? Would it be possible to easily enhance this script by allowing the user to pass in an SQL query parameter to the sql script? I attempted this in Perl by substituting the string "p_1" in the where clause of the sql code but I could not substitute this string with the value in the cgi code (ie. $query =~ s/p_1/value_variable/;). Perhaps it would be easier in Python? Also, would the user supplied parameter be a security issue? Thanks! Below is a link to the article: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1160000/1152907/8281.html?key1=1152907&key2=9804109511&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
