>> 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. >> 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.
The centralized approach to this is certainly not achieved by overloading getattr alone - because even if it was possible to do so (which it isn't), the implementation needed a way to know when to use escaping or not. Which would be signaled by some means, e.g. a thread-local variable or even a global (shudder). This signal gets set in the code that decides that it wants the data escaped - or not. And thus the code looks like this: needs_escaping() work_with_objects() no_escaping_anymore() But that is fragile, think of work_with_objects() throwing an exception and the no_escaping_anymore() isn't called again. So the better approach is to gather the data as it is, and when you transform it to something that requires escaping, do it there. That means: the way to do it is to use one of the gazillion web templating systems that already do this escaping for you. Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
